_
co >-
Gift of
YALE UNIVERSITY
With the aid of the
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
1949
BOOKS BY ALLEN TATE
minium
STONEWALL JACKSON: THE GOOD SOLDIER (1928)
MR. POPE AND OTHER POEMS (1928)
JEFFERSON DAVIS: His RISE AND FALL ( 1929)
THREE POEMS (1930)
POEMS: 1928-1931 (1932)
REACTIONARY ESSAYS ON POETRY AND IDEAS ( 1936)
THE MEDITERRANEAN AND OTHER POEMS (1936)
SELECTED POEMS (1937)
THE FATHERS (1938)
REASON IN MADNESS ( 1941 )
THE VIGIL OF VENUS (1943)
THE WINTER SEA (1944)
POEMS: 1922-1947 (1948)
POEMS
1922-1947
POEMS
1922-1947
BY
ALLEN TATE
For oft in midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the newborn infant's ear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1949
COPYRIGHT, 1932, 1937, 1948, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY MINTON, BALCH AND Co.
COPYRIGHT, 1936, BY RONALD LANE LATIMER
COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY PARTISAN REVIEW
COPYRIGHT, 1943, 1945, BY ALLEN TATE
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons
TO
CAROLINE GORDON
NOTE
I considered arranging these poems in
the order of their writing but gave it up be-
cause I couldn't imagine a reader who would
be interested in it. Some of the earliest pieces
will be found next to the latest; only a few
dates are given. I am not sure I could explain
why I think certain poems go with others,
in the groups into which the book is divided;
at any rate a book of verse in sections is
easier to take hold of than an unbroken string
of poems. Somewhat more than half of this
book appeared as Selected Poems in 1937;
it contains all of The Winter Sea (1944),
besides a few poems not collected before.
A. T.
CONTENTS
I
Page
THE MEDITERRANEAN 3
AENEAS AT WASHINGTON 5
TO THE ROMANTIC TRADITIONISTS 7
THE ANCESTORS 9
MESSAGE FROM ABROAD 10
TO THE LACEDEMONIANS 14
ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD 19
II
SEASONS OF THE SOUL,
I. Summer 27
II. Autumn 30
III. Winter 33
IV. Spring 36
III
RECORDS
I. A Dream 43
II. A Vision 44
MOTHER AND SON 46
THE PARADIGM 48
CONTENTS
Page
SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS 50
MORE SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS 52
FALSE NIGHTMARE 56
JUBILO 59
WINTER MASK TO THE MEMORY OF
W. B. YEATS 62
THE EYE 66
IV
HORAHAN EPODE TO TIIK DUCHESS OF MALFI 71
RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY 73
CAUSERIE 77
FRAGMENT OF A MEDITATION 83
ELEGY 89
ECLOGUE OF THE LIBERAL AND THE POET 91
ODE TO OUR YOUNG PRO-CONSULS OF THE AIR 95
V
ODE TO FEAR 103
THE TRAVELLER 105
THE OATH 107
DITTY 109
THE WOLVES 110
THE SUBWAY 112
THE EAGLE 113
CONTENTS
Page
LAST DAYS OF ALICE 115
THE TWELVE 117
THE TROUT MAP 118
THE MEANING OF LIFE 120
THE MEANING OF DEATH 122
THE CROSS 125
VI
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE 129
DEATH OF LITTLE BOYS 131
THE ANABASIS 132
SHADOW AND SHADE 134
PASTORAL 136
MR. POPE 138
TO A ROMANTIC 139
UNNATURAL LOVE 140
THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 141
THE PROGRESS OF CENIA 143
SONNET TO BEAUTY 149
LIGHT 150
HOMILY 151
ART 152
IGNIS FATUUS 153
VII
IDIOT 157
[ 1
Xlll ]
CONTENTS
Page
A PAUPER 159
OBITUARY 161
EMBLEMS 163
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD 166
VIII
Translations
THE VIGIL OF VENUS ( PERVIGILIUM
VENERIS )
Introductory Note 175
Pervigilium Veneris 184
The Vigil of Venus 185
FAREWELL TO ANACTORIA ( SAPPHO ) 202
ADAPTATION OF A THEME BY CATULLUS 204
CORRESPONDENCES (BAUDELAIRE) 205
A CARRION (BAUDELAIRE) 206
I
I
\ I
:
:
1
:
i
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!
THE MEDITERRANEAN
Quern das finem, rex magne, dolorum?
Where we went in the boat was a long bay
A slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone-
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore,
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl to take that sweet land in!
[3]
THE MEDITERRANEAN
Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?
We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide-
Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!
What country shall we conquer, what fair land
Unman our conquest and locate our blood?
We've cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!
Now, from the -Gates of Hercules we flood
Westward, westward till the barbarous brine
Whelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,
Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine
Rot on the vine: in that land were we born.
[4 ]
AENEAS AT WASHINGTON
I myself saw furious with blood
Neoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae,
Hecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam
Cut down, his filth drenching the holy fires.
In that extremity I bore me well,
A true gentleman, valorous in arms,
Disinterested and honourable. Then fled:
That was a time when civilization
Run by the few fell to the many, and
Crashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms:
Cold victualing I seized, I hoisted up
The old man my father upon my back,
In the smoke made by sea for a new world
Saving little a mind imperishable
If time is, a love of past things tenuous
As the hesitation of receding love.
(To the reduction of uncitied littorals
We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,
Our hunger breeding calculation
And fixed triumphs)
[5 ]
AENEAS AT WASHINGTON
I saw the thirsty dove
In the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening
And tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass
All lying rich forever in the green sun.
I see all things apart, the towers that men
Contrive I too contrived long, long ago.
Now I demand little. The singular passion
Abides its object and consumes desire
In the circling shadow of its appetite.
There was a time when the young eyes were slow,
Their flame steady beyond the firstling fire,
I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall
By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
The city my blood had built I knew no more
While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
Consecutively dark.
Stuck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
[6]
TO THE ROMANTIC TRADITIONISTS
I have looked at them long,
My eyes blur; sourceless light
Keeps them forever young
Before our ageing sight.
You see them too strict forms
Of will, the secret dignity
Of our dissolute storms;
They grow too bright to be.
What were they like? What mark
Can signify their charm?
They never saw the dark;
Rigid, they never knew alarm.
Do not the scene rehearse!
The perfect eyes enjoin
A contemptuous verse;
We speak the crabbed line.
[7 ]
TO THE ROMANTIC TRADITION1STS
Immaculate race! to yield
Us final knowledge set
In a cold frieze, a field
Of war but no blood let.
Are they quite willing,
Do they ask to pose,
Naked and simple, chilling
The very wind's nose?
They ask us how to live!
We answer: Again try
Being the drops we sieve.
What death it is to die!
Therefore because they nod,
Being too full of us,
I look at the turned sod
Where it is perilous
And yawning all the same
As if we knew them not
And history had no name-
No need to name the spot!
[ 8 ]
THE ANCESTORS
When the night's coming and the last light falls
A weak child among lost shadows on the floor,
It is your listening: pulse heeds the strain
Of fore and after, wind shivers the door.
What masterful delay commands the blood
Breaking its access to the living heart?
Consider this, the secret indecision,
Not rudeness of time but the systaltic flood
Of ancient failure begging its new start:
The flickered pause between the day and night
(When the heart knows its informality)
The bones hear but the eyes will never see-
Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space
Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
There is no man on earth who can be free
Of this, the eldest in the latest crime.
[9]
MESSAGE FROM ABROAD
To Andrew Lytle
Paris, November 1929
Their faces are bony and sharp but very red, although
their ancestors nearly two hundred years have dwelt
by the miasmal banks of tidewaters where malarial fever
makes men gaunt and dosing with quinine shakes them
as with a palsy. Traveller to America (1799).
I
What years of the other times, what centuries
Broken, divided up and claimed? A few
Here and there to the taste, in vigilance
Ceaseless, but now a little stale, to keep us
Fearless, not worried as the hare scurrying
Without memory . . .
Provence,
The Renascence, the age of Pericles, each
A broad, rich-carpeted stair to pride
With manhood now the costthey're easy to follow
[ 10]
MESSAGE FROM ABROAD
For the ways taken are all notorious,
Lettered, sculptured, and rhymed;
Those others, incuriously complete, lost,
Not by poetry and statues timed,
Shattered by sunlight and the impartial sleet.
What years . . . What centuries . . .
Now only
The bent eaves and the windows cracked,
The thin grass picked by the wind,
Heaved by the mole; the hollow pine that
Screams in the latest storm these,
These emblems of twilight have we seen at length,
And the man red-faced and tall seen, leaning
In the day of his strength
Not as a pine, but the stiff form
Against the west pillar,
Hearing the ox-cart in the street
His shadow gliding, a long nigger
Gliding at his feet.
[in
MESSAGE FROM ABROAD
II
Wanderers to the east, wanderers west:
I followed the cold northern track,
The sleet sprinkled the sea;
The dim foam mounted
The night, the ship mounted
The depths of night-
How absolute the sea!
With dawn came the gull to the crest,
Stared at the spray, fell asleep
Over the picked bones, the white face
Of the leaning man drowned deep;
The red-faced man, ceased wandering,
Never came to the boulevards
Nor covertly spat in the sawdust
Sunk in his collar
Shuffling the cards;
The man with the red face, the stiff back,
I cannot see in the rainfall
Down Saint-Michel by the quays,
At the corner the wind speaking
Destiny, the four ways.
[ 12 ]
MESSAGE FROM ABROAD
III
I cannot see you
The incorruptibles,
Yours was a secret fate,
The stiff -backed liars, the dupes:
The universal blue
Of heaven rots,
Your anger is out of date
What did you say mornings?
Evenings, what?
The bent eaves
On the cracked house,
That ghost of a hound. . . .
The man red-faced and tall
Will cast no shadow
From the province of the drowned.
TO THE LACEDEMONIANS
An old soldier on the night before the veterans
reunion talks partly to himself, partly to imaginary com-
rades:
The people people of my kind, my own
People but strange with a white light
In the face: the streets hard with motion
And the hard eyes that look one way.
Listen! the high whining tone
Of the motors, I hear the dull commotion:
I am come, a child in an old play.
I am here with a secret in the night;
Because I am here the dead wear gray.
It is a privilege to be dead; for you
Cannot know what absence is nor seize
The ordour of pure distance until
From you, slowly dying in the head,
All sights and sounds of the moment, all
The life of sweet intimacy shall fall
Like a swift at dusk.
[ 14]
TO THE LACEDEMONIANS
Sheer time! Stroke of the heart
Towards retirement. . . .
Gentlemen, my secret is
Damnation: where have they, the citizens, all
Come from? They were not born in my father's
House, nor in their fathers': on a street corner
By motion sired, not born; by rest dismayed.
The tempest will unwind the hurricane
Consider, knowing its end, the headlong pace?
I have watched it and endured it, I have delayed
Judgment: it warn't in my time, by God, so
That the mere breed absorbed the generation!
Yet I, hollow head, do see but little;
Old man: no memory: aimless distractions.
I was a boy, I never knew cessation
Of the bright course of blood along the vein;
Moved, an old dog by me, to field and stream
In the speaking ease of the fall rain;
When I was a boy the light on the hills
Was there because I could see it, not because
Some special gift of God had put it there.
[ 15]
TO THE LACEDEMONIANS
Men expect too much, do too little,
Put the contraption before the accomplishment,
Lack skill of the interior mind
To fashion dignity with shapes of air.
Luxury, yes but not elegance!
Where have they come from?
Go you tell them
That we their servants, well-trained, gray-coated
And haired (both foot and horse) or in
The grave, them obey . . . obey them,
What commands?
My father said
That everything but kin was less than kind.
The young men like swine argue for a rind,
A flimsy shell to put their weakness in;
Will-less, ruled by what they cannot see;
Hunched like savages in a rotten tree
They wait for the thunder to speak: Union!
That joins their separate fear.
I fought
But did not care; a leg shot off at Bethel,
Given up for dead; but knew neither shell-shock
[ 16 ]
TO THE LACEDEMONIANS
Nor any self-indulgence. Well may war be
Terrible to those who have nothing to gain
For the illumination of the sense:
When the peace is a trade route, figures
For the budget, reduction of population,
Life grown sullen and immense
Lusts after immunity to pain.
There is no civilization without death;
There is now the wind for breath.
Waken, lords and ladies gay, we cried,
And marched to Cedar Run and Malvern Hill,
Kinsmen and friends from Texas to the Tide-
Vain chivalry of the personal will!
Waken, we shouted, lords and ladies gay,
We go to win the precincts of the light,
Unshadowing restriction of our day. . . .
Regard now, in the seventy years of night,
Them, the young men who watch us from the curbs:
They hold the glaze of wonder in their stare
Our crooked backs, hands fetid as old herbs,
The tallow eyes, wax face, the foreign hairl
[ 17]
TO THE LACEDEMONIANS
Soldiers, march! we shall not fight again
The Yankees with our guns well-aimed and rammed-
All are born Yankees of the race of men
And this, too, now the country of the damned:
Poor bodies crowding round us! The white face
Eyeless with eyesight only, the modern power-
Huddled sublimities of time and space,
They are the echoes of a raging tower
That reared its moment upon a gone land,
Pquring a long cold wrath into the mind-
Damned souls, running the way of sand
Into the destination of the wind!
[ 18]
ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.
Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel's stare
[ 19]
ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.
Dazed by the wind, only the wind
The leaves flying, plunge
You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You knowthe immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision-
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.
[20]
ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD
Seeing, seeing only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire
Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick-and-fast
You will curse the setting sun.
Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm
You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.
The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
[21 ]
ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD
What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl's tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.
We shall say only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire
We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing;
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.
[ 22 ]
ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD
What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the
grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?
Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush-
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
[23 ]
II
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
To the memory of John Peale Bishop, 1892-1944
Attor porsi la mano un poco avante,
e colsi un ramicel da un gran pruno;
e U tronco suo gridd: Perchd mi schiante?
I. SUMMER
Slimmer, this is our flesh,
The body you let mature;
If now while the body is fresh
You take it, shall we give
The heart, lest heart endure
The mind's tattering
Blow of greedy claws?
Shall mind itself still live
If like a hunting king
It falls to the lion's jaws?
[27 ]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
Under the summer's blast
The soul cannot endure
Unless by sleight or fast
It seize or deny its day
To make the eye secure.
Brothers-in-arms, remember
The hot wind dries and draws
With circular delay
The flesh, ash from the ember,
Into the summer's jaws.
It was a gentle sun
When, at the June solstice
Green France was overrun
With caterpillar feet.
No head knows where its rest is
Or may lie down with reason
When war's usurping claws
Shall take the heart escheat-
Green field in burning season
To stain the weevil's jaws.
[28]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
The southern summer dies
Evenly in the fall:
We raise our tired eyes
Into a sky of glass,
Blue, empty, and tall
Without tail or head
Where burn the equal laws
For Balaam and his ass
Above the invalid dead,
Who cannot lift their jaws.
When was it that the summer
(Daylong a liquid light)
And a child, the new-comer,
Bathed in the same green spray,
Could neither guess the night?
The summer had no reason;
Then, like a primal cause
It had its timeless day
Before it kept the season
Of time's engaging jaws.
[29 ]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
Two men of our summer world
Descended winding hell
And when their shadows curled
They fearfully confounded
The vast concluding shell:
Stopping, they saw in the narrow
Light a centaur pause
And gaze, then his astounded
Beard, with a notched arrow,
Part back upon his jaws.
II. AUTUMN
It had an autumn smell
And that was how I knew
That I was down a well:
I was no longer young;
My lips were numb and blue,
The air was like fine sand
In a butcher's stall
Or pumice to the tongue:
And when I raised my hand
I stood in the empty hall.
[30]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
The round ceiling was high
And the gray light like shale
Thin, crumbling, and dry:
No rug on the bare floor
Nor any carved detail
To which the eye could glide;
I counted along the wall
Door after closed door
Through which a shade might slide
To the cold and empty hall.
I will leave this house, I said,
There is the autumn weather-
Here, nor living nor dead;
The lights burn in the town
Where men fear together.
Then on the bare floor,
But tiptoe lest I fall,
I walked years down
Towards the front door
At the end of the empty hall.
[31 ]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
Two men of our summer world
Descended winding hell
And when their shadows curled
They fearfully confounded
The vast concluding shell:
Stopping, they saw in the narrow
Light a centaur pause
And gaze, then his astounded
Beard, with a notched arrow,
Part back upon his jaws,
II. AUTUMN
It had an autumn smell
And that was how I knew
That I was down a well:
I was no longer young;
My lips were numb and blue,
The air was like fine sand
In a butcher's stall
Or pumice to the tongue:
And when I raised my hand
I stood in the empty hall.
[30]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
The round ceiling was high
And the gray light like shale
Thin, crumbling, and dry:
No rug on the bare floor
Nor any carved detail
To which the eye could glide;
I counted along the wall
Door after closed door
Through which a shade might slide
To the cold and empty hall.
I will leave this house, I said,
There is the autumn weather-
Here, nor living nor dead;
The lights burn in the town
Where men fear together.
Then on the bare floor,
But tiptoe lest I fall,
I walked years down
Towards the front door
At the end of the empty hall.
[31 ]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
The door was false no key
Or lock, and I was caught
In the house; yet I could see
I had been born to it
For miles of running brought
Me back where I began.
I saw now in the wall
A door open a slit
And a fat grizzled man
Come out into the hall:
As in a moonlit street
Men meeting are too shy
To check their hurried feet
But raise their eyes and squint
As through a needle's eye
Into the faceless gloom,
My father in a gray shawl
Gave me an unseeing glint
And entered another room!
I stood in the empty hall
[32]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
And watched them come and go
From one room to another,
Old men, old women slow,
Familiar; girls, boys;
I saw my downcast mother
Clad in her street-clothes,
Her blue eyes long and small.
Who had no look or voice
For him whose vision froze
Him in the empty hall.
HI. WINTER
Goddess sea-born and bright,
Return into the sea
Where eddying twilight
Gathers upon your people-
Cold goddess, hear our plea!
Leave the burnt earth, Venus,
For the drying God above,
Hanged in his windy steeple,
No longer bears for us
The living wound of love.
[ 33 ]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
All the sea-gods are dead.
You, Venus, come home
To your salt maidenhead,
The tossed anonymous sea
Under shuddering foam-
Shade for lovers, where
A shark swift as your dove
Shall pace our company
All night to nudge and tear
The livid wound of love.
And now the winter sea:
Within her hollow rind
What sleek facility
Of sea-conceited scop
To plumb the nether mind!
Eternal winters blow
Shivering flakes, and shove
Bodies that wheel and drop-
Cold soot upon the snow
Their livid wound of love.
[34]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
Beyond the undertow
The gray sea-foliage
Transpires a phosphor glow
Into the circular miles:
In the centre of his cage
The pacing animal
Surveys the jungle cove
And slicks his slithering wiles
To turn the venereal awl
In the livid wound of love.
Beyond the undertow
The rigid madrepore
Resists the winter's flow-
Headless, unageing oak
That gives the leaf no more.
Wilfully as I stood
Within the thickest grove
I seized a branch, which broke;
I heard the speaking blood
(From the livid wound of love)
[35]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
Drip down upon my toe:
"We are the men who died
Of self-inflicted woe,
Lovers whose stratagem
Led to their suicide."
I touched my sanguine hair
And felt it drip above
Their brother who, like them,
Was maimed and did not bear
The living wound of love.
IV. SPRING
Irritable spring, infuse
Into the burning breast
Your combustible juice
That as a liquid soul
Shall be the body's guest
Who lights, but cannot stay
To comfort this unease
Which, like a dying coal,
Hastens the cooler day
Of the mother of silences.
[36]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
Back in my native prime
I saw the orient corn
All space but no time,
Reaching for the sun
Of the land where I was born:
It was a pleasant land
Where even death could please
Us with an ancient pun-
All dying for the hand
Of the mother of silences.
In time of bloody war
Who will know the time?
Is it a new spring star
Within the timing chill,
Talking, or just a mime,
That rises in the blood-
Thin Jack-and-Jilling seas
Without the human will?
Its light is at the flood,
Mother of silencesl
[371
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
It burns us each alone
Whose burning arrogance
Burns up the rolling stone,
This earth Platonic cave
Of vertiginous chance!
Come, tired Sisyphus,
Cover the cave's egress
Where light reveals the slave,
Who rests when sleeps with us
The mother of silences.
Come, old woman, save
Your sons who have gone down
Into the burning cave:
Come, mother, and lean
At the window with your son
And gaze through its light frame
These fifteen centuries
Upon the shirking scene
Where men, blind, go lame:
Then, mother of silences,
[38]
SEASONS OF THE SOUL
Speak, that we may hear;
Listen, while we confess
That we conceal our fear;
Regard us, while the eye
Discerns by sight or guess
Whether, as sheep foregather
Upon their crooked knees,
We have begun to die;
Whether your kindness, mother,
Is mother of silences.
[39]
RECORDS
I. A DREAM
At nine years a sickly boy lay down
At bedtime on a cot by mother's bed
And as the two darks merged the room became
So strange it left the boy half dead:
The boy-man on the Ox Road walked along
The man he was to be and yet another,
It seemed the grandfather of his mother,
In knee-breeches silver-buckled like a song,
His hair long and a cocked hat on his head,
A straight back and slow dignity for stride;
The road, red clay sun-cracked and baked,
Led fearlessly through scrub pines on each side
Hour after hour the old road cracked and burned,
The trees countless, and his thirst unslaked.
Yet steadily with discipline like fate
Without memory, too ancient to be learned,
The man walked on and as if it were yesterday
Came easily to a two-barred gate
[ 43 ]
RECORDS
And stopped, and peering over a little way
He saw a dog-run country store fallen-in,
Deserted, but he said, "Who's there?"
And then a tall fat man with stringy hair
And a manner that was innocent of sin,
His galluses greasy, his eyes coldly gray,
Appeared, and with a gravely learned air
Spoke from the deep coherence of hell
The pines thundered, the sky blacked away,
The man in breeches, all knowledge in his stare,
A moment shuddered as the world fell.
II. A VISION
At twenty years the strong boy walked alone
Most fashionably dressed in the deserted park
At midnight, where the far lights burned low
And summer insects whined with little tone.
There was a final and comfortable dark
So that he walked deliberately slow;
It was not far from home, he'd been to see
His girl, who had sat silent and alone.
Picking his way upon the patched brick walk,
It being less dark near the street, he hastened
[44]
RECORDS
And knew a sense of fine immediacy
And then he heard some old forgotten talk
At a short distance like a hundred miles
Filling the air with its secrecy,
And was afraid of all the living air:
Now between steps with one heel lifted
A stern command froze him to the spot
And then a tall thin man with stringy hair,
Fear in his eyes, his breath quick and hot,
His arms lank and his neck a little twisted,
Spoke, and the trees sifted the air:
'Tin growing old/' he said, "y u have no choice/'
And said no more, but his bright eyes insisted
Incalculably with his relentless voice.
[45]
MOTHER AND SON
Now all day long the man who is not dead
Hastens the dark with inattentive eyes,
The woman with white hand and erect head
Stares at the covers, leans for the son's replies
At last to her importunate womanhood
Her hand of death laid on the living bed;
So lives the fierce compositor of blood.
She waits; he lies upon the bed of sin
Where greed, avarice, anger writhed and slept
Till to their silence they were gathered in:
There, fallen with time, his tall and bitter kin
Once fired the passions that were never kept
In the permanent heart, and there his mother lay
To bear him on the impenetrable day.
The falcon mother cannot will her hand
Up to the bed, nor break the manacle
His exile sets upon her harsh command
That he should say the time is beautiful-
Transfigured by her own possessing light:
The sick man craves the impalpable night.
[46]
MOTHER AND SON
Loosed betwixt eye and lid, the swimming beams
Of memory, blind school of cuttlefish,
Rise to the air, plunge to the cold streams-
Rising and plunging the half-forgotten wish
To tear his heart out in a slow disgrace
And freeze the hue of terror to her face.
Hate, misery, and fear beat off his heart
To the dry fury of the woman's mind;
The son, prone in his autumn, moves apart
A seed blown upon a returning wind.
O child, be vigilant till towards the south
On the flowered wall all the sweet afternoon,
The reaching sun, swift as the cottonmouth,
Strikes at the black crucifix on her breast
Where the cold dusk comes suddenly to rest-
Mortality will speak the victor soonl
The dreary flies, lazy and casual,
Stick to the ceiling, buzz along the wall.
O heart, the spider shuffles from the mould
Weaving, between the pinks and grapes, his pall.
The bright wallpaper, imperishably old,
Uncurls and flutters, it will never fall.
[ 47 ]
THE PARADIGM
For when they meet, the tensile air
Like fine steel strains under the weight
Of messages that both hearts bear-
Pure passion once, now purest hate;
Till the taut air like a cold hand
Clasped to cold hand and bone to bone
Seals them up in their icy land
(A few square feet) where into stone
The two hearts turning quickly pass
Once more their impenetrable world;
So fades out each heart's looking-glass
Whose image is the surface hurled
By all the air; air, glass is not;
So is their fleeting enmity
Like a hard mirror crashed by what
The quality of air must be.
[ 48 ]
THE PARADIGM
For in the air all lovers meet
After they've hated out their love;
Love's but the echo of retreat
Caught by the sunbeam stretched above
Their frozen exile from the earth
And lost. Each is the other's crime.
This is their equity in birth-
Hate is its ignorant paradigm.
[49]
SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS
(1934)
This is the day His hour of life draws near,
Let me get ready from head to foot for it
Most handily with eyes to pick the year
For small feed to reward a feathered wit.
Some men would see it an epiphany
At ease, at food and drink, others at chase
Yet I, stung lassitude, with ecstasy
Unspent argue the season's difficult case
So: Man, dull critter of enormous head,
What would he look at in the coiling sky?
But I must kneel again unto the Dead
While Christmas bells of paper white and red,
Figured with boys and girls spilt from a sled,
Ring out the silence I am nourished by.
[ 50 ]
SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS
II
Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going years, caught in an accurate glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ's deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored to the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire's daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.
[51]
MORE SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS
(1942)
To Denis Devlin
I
Again the native hour lets down the locks
Uncombed and black, but gray the bobbing beard;
Ten years ago His eyes, fierce shuttlecocks,
Pierced the close net of what I failed: I feared
The belly-cold, the grave-clout, that betrayed
Me dithering in the drift of cordial seas;
Ten years are time enough to be dismayed
By mummy Christ, head crammed between his
knees.
Suppose I take an arrogant bomber, stroke
By stroke, up to the frazzled sun to hear
Sun-ghostlings whisper: Yes, the capital yoke-
Remove it and there's not a ghost to fear
This crucial day, whose decapitate joke
Languidly winds into the inner ear.
[ 52 ]
MORE SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS
II
The day's at end and there's nowhere to go,
Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying;
Get up and once again politely lying
Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe
With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow.
How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang
And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang
Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago!
Then hang this picture for a calendar,
As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly
For the cold martial progress of your star,
With thoughts of commerce and society,
Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing,
The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring.
[53]
MORE SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS
III
Give me this day a faith not personal,
As follows: The American people fully armed
With assurance policies, righteous and harmed,
Battle the world of which they're not at all.
That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall,
His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed:
"You may be President"), was not alarmed
Ndr even left uneasy by his fall.
Nobody said that he could be a plumber,
Carpenter, clerk, bus-driver, bombardier;
Let little boys go into violent slumber,
Aegean squall and squalor where their fear
Is of an enemy in remote oceans
Unstalked by Christ: these are the better notions.
[54]
MORE SONNETS AT CHRISTMAS
IV
Gay citizen, myself, and thoughtful friend,
Your ghosts are Plato's Christians in the cave.
Unfix your necks, turn to the door; the nave
Gives back the cheated and light dividend
So long sequestered; now, new-rich, you'll spend
Flesh for reality inside a stone
Whose light obstruction, like a gossamer bone,
Dead or still living, will not break or bend.
Thus light, your flesh made pale and sinister
And put off like a dog that's had his day,
You will be Plato's kept philosopher,
Albino man bleached from the mortal clay,
Mild-mannered, gifted in your master's ease
While the sun squats upon the waveless seas.
FALSE NIGHTMARE
"I give the yawp barbaric
Of piety and pelf
(Who now reads Herrick?)
"And contradict myself
No matter, the verse is large.
My five-and-ten cent shelf
"The continent is: my targe
Bigger than Greece. The shock
Of Me exceeds its marge
"Myself the old cock
With wind and water wild
(Hell with the privy lock):
"I have no woman child;
Onan-Amurikee
My son, alone, beguiled
"By my complacency
In priggery to slay
My blind posterity . . ."
[56]
FALSE NIGHTMARE
These words, at dawn of day
In the sleep-awakened mind,
I made Walt Whitman say:
Wherefore I and my kind
Wear meekly in the face
A pale honeydew rind
Of rotten-sweet grace;
Ungracefully doating
Great-aunts hanged in lace
We are: mildly gloating
Dog bones in a trunk
Saved in the attic. . . .
Floating
Hating king and monk,
The classes and the mass,
We chartered an old junk
(Like Jesus on his ass)
Unto the smutty corn
And smirking sassafras.
[57 ]
FALSE NIGHTMARE
In bulled Europa's morn
We love our land because
All night we raped hertorn,
Blue grass and glade. Jackdaws,
Buzzards and crows the land
Love with prurient claws;
So may I cunning my hand
To clip the increment
From the land or quicksand;
For unto us God sent
To gloze with iron bonds
The dozing continent
The fallow graves, ponds
Full of limp fish, tall
Terrains, fields and fronds
Through which we crawl, and call.
[58]
JUBILO
To Arthur Mizener
Hit mus be now de Kingdom comiri
And de year of Jubilo . . .
Tail-spinning from the shelves of sky
See how it dips and tacks and tosses
To cast a beam in the mind's eye:
Who will count the gains and the losses
On the Day of Jubilo?
Public accountant with double entry
Enter in red war's final cast
In the black column the pacing sentry,
Old women picking the hogs' mast
For the Day of Jubilo
Lean to the crowded air and hear,
Eavesdropper, how it goes inside
Your own deaf and roaring ear:
Boys caress the machines they ride
On the Day of Jubilo
[ 59]
JUB1LO
After the dry and sticking tongue
After our incivility
Who will inflate the poet's lung
Gone flat of this indignity
Till the Day of Jubilo?
Scholar, no dog will have your day
For all your capital's run out,
Wry baby in wet disarray-
Scholar, prepare your meagre clout
For the Day of Jubilo
Under the slip and slide of day
Think, at the end you'll never be
Trapped in a fox-hole of decay
Nor snip nor glide of history
After the Day of Jubilo
All our jubilant eyes are raised,
Jubilo. Over the barbican
On the great Day pure and dazed,
Empty of heart the empty man
Of the Day of Jubilo
[ 60 ]
JUBILO
Then for the Day of Jubilo
The patient bares his arm at dawn
To suck the blood's transfusing glow
And then when all the blood is gone
(For the Day of Jubilo)
Salt serum stays his arteries
Sly tide threading the ribs of sand,
Till his lost being dries, and cries
For that unspeakable salt land
Beyond the Day of Jubilo.
[ 61 ]
WINTER MASK
To the memory of W. B. Yeats
Towards nightfall when the wind
Tries the eaves and casements
(A winter wind of the mind
Long gathering its will)
I lay the mind's contents
Bare, as upon a table,
And ask, in a time of war,
Whether there is still
To a mind frivolously dull
Anything worth living for.
WINTER MASK
II
If I am meek and dull
And a poor sacrifice
Of perverse will to cull
The act from the attempt,
Just look into damned eyes
And give the returning glare;
For the damned like it, the more
Damnation is exempt
From what would save its heir
With a thing worth living for.
Ill
The poisoned rat in the wall
Cuts through the wall like a knife,
Then blind, drying, and small
And driven to cold water,
Dies of the water of life:
Both damned in eternal ice,
The traitor become the boor
Who had led his friend to slaughter,
Now bites his head not nice,
The food that he lives for.
[63]
WINTER MASK
IV
I supposed two scenes of hell,
Two human bestiaries,
Might uncommonly well
Convey the doom I thought;
But lest the horror freeze
The gentler estimation
I go to the sylvan door
Where nature has been bought
In rational proration
As a thing worth living for.
Should the buyer have been beware?
It is an uneven trade
For man has wet his hair
Under the winter weather
With only fog for shade:
His mouth a bracketed hole
Picked by the crows that bore
Nature to their hanged brother,
Who rattles against the bole
The thing that he lived for.
[64 ]
WINTER MASK
VI
I asked the master Yeats
Whose great style could not tell
Why it is man hates
His own salvati6n,
Prefers the way to hell,
And finds his last safety
In the self-made curse that bore
Him towards damnation:
The drowned undrowned by the se
The sea worth living for.
[65]
THE EYE
i
XatSprj tcopcovij, **> TO ^64\o<? ovtc
CALLIMACHUS.
To E. E. Cummings
I see the horses and the sad streets
Of my childhood in an agate eye
Roving, under the clean sheets,
Over a black hole in the sky.
The ill man becomes the child,
The evil man becomes the lover;
The natural man with evil roiled
Pulls down the sphereless sky for cover.
I see the gray heroes and the graves
Of my childhood in the nuclear eye-
Horizons spent in dun caves
Sucked down into the sinking sky.
The happy child becomes the man,
The elegant man becomes the mind,
The fathered gentleman who can
Perform quick feats of gentle kind.
[66]
THE EYE
I see the long field and the noon
Of my childhood in the carbolic eye,
Dissolving pupil of the moon
Seared from the raveled hole of the sky.
The nice ladies and gentlemen,
The teaser and the jelly-bean
Play cockalorum-and-the-hen,
When the cool afternoons pour green:
I see the father and the cooling cup
Of my childhood in the swallowing sky
Down, down, until down is up
And there is nothing in the eye,
Shut shutter of the mineral man
Who takes the fatherless dark to bed,
The acid sky to the brain-pan;
And calls the crows to peck his head.
[ 67
IV
HORATIAN EPODE TO THE DUCHESS
OF MALFI
Duchess: Who am IP
Bosola: Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a
salvatory of green mummy.
The stage is about to be swept of corpses.
You have no more chance than an infusorian
Lodged in a hollow molar of an eohippus.
Come, now, no prattle of remergence with the
OV.
As (the form requires the myth)
A Greek girl stood once in the prytaneum
Of Carneades, hearing mouthings of Probability,
Then mindful of love dashed her brain on a megalith
So you, O nameless Duchess who die young,
Meet death somewhat lovingly
And I am filled with a pity of beholding skulls.
There was no pride like yours.
[ 71 ]
HORATIAN EPODE TO THE DUCHESS OF MALFI
Now considerations of the void coming after
Not changed by the "strict gesture" of your death
Split the straight line of pessimism
Into two infinities.
It is moot whether there be divinities
As I finish this play by Webster:
The street-cars are still running however
And the katharsis fades in the warm water of a yawn.
[72]
RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY
Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,
The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness;
sleep
Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the
towers,
The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway.
What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep
Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch
Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf
Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.
And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees
Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy
To the backs of obsessions.
Winter like spring no less
Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently
The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre
impudence.
[ 73 ]
RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY
In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus
Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the
element
Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle
The cow's gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain.
Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Par-
thenon
In ..Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now
(The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your
teeth
"Hitting on all thirty-two;" scholarship pares
The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores
His "passionate underwear;" morality disciplines
the other
Person; every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rous-
seau;
Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated univer-
sities, three
Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is
obscene;
Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.
[74 ]
RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY
In every railroad station everywhere every lover
Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke
Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body
Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,
His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth
Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders
Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are
dead.
More sanitation is enough, enough remains: dreams
Do not end lucidities beyond the stint of thought.
For intellect is a mansion where waste is without
drain;
A corpse is your bedfellow, your great-grandfather
dines
With you this evening on a cavalry horse. Intellect
Connives with heredity, creates fate as Euclid geome-
try
By definition:
The sunlit bones in your house
Are immortal in the titmouse,
They trip the feet of grandma
Like an afterthought each day.
These unseen sunlit bones,
[75]
RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY
They may be in the cat
That startles them in grandma
But look at this or that
They meet you every way.
For Pelops' and Tantalus' successions were at once
simpler,
If perplexed, and less subtle than you think.
Heredity
Proposes love, love exacts language, and we lack
Language. When shall we speak again? When shall
The sparrow dusting the gutter sing? When shall
This drift with silence meet the sun? When shall I
wake?
[ 76
CAUSERIE
. . . party on the stage of the Earl Carroll Theatre on
Feb. 23. At this party Joyce Hawley, a chorus-girl,
bathed in the nude in a bathtub filled with alleged
wine. New York Times.
What are the springs of sleep? What is the motion
Of dust in the lane that has an end in falling?
Heroes, heroes, you auguries of passion,
Where are the heroes with sloops and telescopes
Who got out of bed at four to vex the dawn?
Men for their last quietus scanned the earth,
Alert on the utmost foothill of the mountains;
They were the men who climbed the topmost screen
Of the world, if sleep but lay beyond it,
Sworn to the portage of our confirmed sensations,
Seeking our image in the farthest hills.
Now bearing a useless testimony of strife
Gathered in a rumor of light, we know our end
A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
[77 ]
CAUSERIE
IVe done no rape, arson, incest, no murder,
Yet cannot sleep. The petty crimes of silence
(Wary pander to whom the truth's chief whore)
I have omitted; no fool can say my tongue
Reversed its fetish and made a cult of conscience.
This innermost disturbance is a babble,
It is a sign moved to my face as well
Where every tide of heart surges to speech
Until in that loquacity of visage
One speaks a countenance fitter for death than hell.
Always your features lean to one direction
And by that charted distance know your doom.
For death is "morality touched with emotion,"
The syllable and full measure of affirmation;
Give life the innocent crutch of quiet fools.
Where is your house, in which room stands your bed?
What window discovers these insupportable dreams?
In a lean house spawned on baked limestone
Blood history is the murmur of grasshoppers
Eastward of the dawn. Have you a daughter,
Daughters are the seed of occupations,
Of asperities, such as wills, deeds, mortgages,
[78 ]
CAUSERIE
Duels, estates, statesmen, pioneers, embezzlers,
"Eminent Virginians," reminiscences, bastards,
The bar-sinister hushed, effaced by the porcelain tub.
A daughter is the fruit of occupations;
Let her not read history lest knowledge
Of her fathers instruct her to be a petty bawd.
Vittoria was herself, the contemporary strumpet
A plain bitch.
For miracles are faint
And resurrection is our weakest clause of religion,
I have known men in my youth who foundered on
This point of doctrine: John Ransom, boasting hardy
Entelechies yet botched in the head, lacking grace;
Warren thirsty in Kentucky, his hair in the rain,
asleep;
None so unbaptized as Edmund Wilson the
unwearied,
That sly parody of the devil. They lacked doctrine;
They waited. I, who watched out the first crisis
With them, wait:
[79]
CAUSERIE
For the incredible image. Now
I am told that Purusha sits no more in our eyes.
Year after year the blood of Christ will sleep
In the holy tree, the branches sagged without bloom
Till the plant overflowing the stale vegetation
In May the creek swells with the anemone,
The Lord God wastes his substance towards the
ocean.
In Christ we have lived, on the flood of Christ borne
up,
Who now is a precipitate flood of silence,
We a drenched wreck off an imponderable shore:
A jagged cloud is our memory of shore
Whereon we figure hills below ultimate ranges.
You cannot plot the tendency of man,
Whither it leads is not mysterious
In the various grave; but whence the impulse
To lust for the apple of apples on Christ's tree,
To desire in the eye, to penetrate your sleep,
Perhaps to catch in unexpected leaves
The light incentive of your absolute suspicion?
[80 ]
CAUSERIE
Over the mountains, the last barrier, you'd spill
These relics of your sires in a pool of sleep,
The sun being drained.
We have learned to require
In the infirm concessions of memory
The privilege never to hear too much.
What is this conversation, now secular,
A speech not mine yet speaking for me in
The heaving jelly of my tribal air?
It rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue;
It perches there for secret tutelage
And gets it, of inscrutable instruction
Which is a puzzle like crepuscular light
That has no visible source but fills the trees
With equal foliage, as if the upper leaf
No less than the under were only imminent shade.
Manhood like a lawyer with his formulas
Sesames his youth for innocent acquittal.
The essential wreckage of your age is different,
The accident the same; the Annabella
[ 81 ]
CAUSERIE
Of proper incest, no longer incestuous:
In an age of abstract experience, fornication
Is self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria,
And whores become delinquents; delinquents,
patients;
Patients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule,
Are precious.
Was it for this that Lucius
Became the ass of Thessaly? For this did Kyd
Unlock the lion of passion on the stage?
To litter a race of politic pimps? To glut
The Capitol with the progeny of thieves
Where now the antique courtesy of your myths
Goes in to sleep under a still shadow?
[82]
FRAGMENT OF A MEDITATION
Not yet the thirtieth year, the thirtieth
Station where time reverses his light heels
To rim both ways, and makes of forward back;
Whose long coordinates are birth and death
And zero is the origin of breath:
Not yet the thirtieth year of gratitude,
Not yet suffering but a year's lack,
All thanks that mid-mortality is done,
That the new breath on the invisible track
Winds anciently into my father's blood.
In the beginning the irresponsible Verb
Connived with chaos whence I've seen it start
Riddles in the head for the nervous heart
To count its beat on: all beginnings run
Like water the easiest way or like birds
Fly on their cool imponderable flood.
Then suddenly the noon turns afternoon
And afternoon like an ill-written page
[83 1
FRAGMENT OF MEDITATION
Will fade, until the very stain of light
Gathers in all the venom of the night
The equilibrium of the thirtieth age.
The thirtieth, not yet the thirtieth year
Of wonders, revelations, whispers, signs:
Impartial dumb truths of sound and sight
Known beyond speech, immune to common fear.
Already the wind whistles the revelations
Of the time, but I'll go back seventy years
And more to the great Administrations:
Yet six had gone and all the public men
Whom doctrine and an evil nature made
Were only errand boys beaten by the sun
While Henry Adams fuddled in the shade.
I've heard what they said, in the running tap
Drawing water, their watery words, clear
Like a sad harlot's useless lucid pap
(I've heard the lion of S Street get his cheer),
I understood it, the general syllable
In a private ear, lost. . . .
[ 84 ]
FRAGMENT OF MEDITATION
For who can tell
What the goat calls to the heifer, or the hen
Even to the cock her love? At thirty years
The years of the Christ, one will perceive, know,
Report new verity with a certain pen.
In the decade from eighteen-fifty-one
Where was Calhoun whose bristled intellect
Sumner the refined one did not admire?
I am convinced 'twas Calhoun who divined
How the great western star's last race would run
Unbridled round our personal defect,
Grinding its ash with engines of its mind.
"Too Southern and too simple," his death's head
Uttered a Dies Irae that last day
When Senator Mason in a voice to stun
Read off his speech; then put Calhoun to bed.
They put him in his grave. Does the worm say
In the close senate of tempestuous clay
That his intellect makes too difficult
The grave, as his enemies our life?
It's quiet there, for the worm's one fault
Is not discourtesy (give worms their dues)
[85 ]
FRAGMENT OF MEDITATION
In case the guest hurried by mortal strife
Enter the house in muddy overshoes.
It was a time of tributes; let me pay
Tribute to a man grandfather knew well
(Or so 'twas said, but one can never tell),
A stocky man but slight, no symmetry
Of face and eye, yet a distinction
Of the poet against the world; he dreamed the soul
Of the wide world and prodigies to come;
Exemplar of dignity, a gentleman
Who raised the black flag of the lower mind;
Hated in life by all; in death praised;
I cannot yet begin to understand
Why we are proud that an ancestor knew
The crazy Poe, who was not of our kind-
Bats in the belfry that round and round flew
In vapors not quite wholesome for the mind.
After Calhoun the local tenements
Of nature, tempered to the exigencies
Of air and fire, blurred with the public sense,
Diffused, while the Black Republicans
Took a short memory to their hot desire,
[86]
FRAGMENT OF MEDITATION
And honor turned a common entity
Crying decisions from the evening news.
Yet in a year, at thirty, one shall see
The wisdom of history, how she takes
Each epoch by the neck and, growling, shakes
It like a rat while she faintly mews.
Perhaps at the age of thirty one shall see
In the wide world the prodigies to come:
The long-gestating Christ, the Agnulus
Of time, got in the belly of Abstraction
By Ambition, a bull of pious use.
O Pasiphael mother of god, lest nature,
Peritonitis or morning sickness stunt
The growth of god in an unwholesome juice,
Eat cannon and cornflakes, that the lamb,
Spaceless as snow, may spare the rational earth
(Weary of prodigies and the Holy Runt)
A second prodigious, two-legged birth.
The signs and portents screaming in the air,
The nativity in my thirtieth year
Will glow in the heavens, the myriad fireflies
At the holy hour hovering round the house
Will stream in the night like flaming hair,
[ 87 ]
FRAGMENT OF MEDITATION
And man will scurry with averted eyes
Crouching, peering, silent, a drunken mouse.
The orange groves will blossom, the shining Sierras
Kindle all night far as Los Angeles;
With a noise, threatening, of wandering bees
Coining, angry with the air of their carouse,
The lamb through the sandpaper gates of life
(Made rougher by the bull's intenser strife)
Will leap, while the wild-eyed Pasiphae
By the inscrutable wrath of glory stung
Hears the Wise Men* come swiftly from the sea.
The bull smoothly rolls his powerful tongue.
* I originally thought of the Wise Men as Mr. Herbert Hoover,
the late Otto H. Kahn (an American banker and philanthropist),
and the late Gertrude Stein; but I decided that the occasion re-
quired even wiser persons than these, and when I couldn't find
them, I gave it up, and brought the poem to an abrupt end.
A. T.
[88 ]
ELEGY
Jefferson Davis: 1808-1889
No more the white refulgent streets.
Never the dry hollows of the mind
Shall he in fine courtesy walk
Again, for death is not unkind.
A civil war cast on his fame,
The four years' odium of strife
Un bodies his dust; love cannot warm
His tall corpuscles to this life.
What did we gain? What did we lose?
Be still; grief for the pious dead
Suspires from bosoms of kind souls
Lavender-wise, propped up in bed.
Our loss put six feet under ground
Is measured by the magnolia's root;
Our gain's the intellectual sound
Of death's feet round a weedy tomb.
[89 ]
ELEGY
In the back chambers of the State
(Just preterition for his crimes)
We curse him to our busy sky
Who's busy in a hell a hundred times
A day, though profitless his task,
Heedless what Belial may say-
He who wore out the perfect mask
Orestes fled in night and day.
[ 90]
ECLOGUE OF THE LIBERAL AND THE POET
LIBERAL
In that place, shepherd, all the men are dead.
POET
Yes, look at the water grim and black
Where immense Europa rears her head,
Her face pinched and her breasts slack.
LIBERAL
I said, shepherd, all the men are dead.
POET
Shall I turn to the road that goes America?
Is that a place for men to be dead
Or living? If you don't mind being asked.
LIBERAL
Try it and see. It's a pretty good way
To skim three thousand miles in a day
And none of them America.
[91]
ECLOGUE OF THE LIBERAL AND THE POET
POET
But what about her face and the tasked
Wonders of her air and soil, her big belly
That Putnam writes about under the sun?
LIBERAL
I don't know Put, I don't know his Nelly
Td name her that if she'd name it fun
But you know she hasn't any name,
Nowhere you touch her she's the same,
POET
What, shepherd, are we talking about?
LIBERAL
You started it, shepherd.
POET
Shepherd, I didn't.
LIBERAL
You did; you saw the poetical face of Europe.
POET
You said it was no place for men to be.
[ 92 ]
ECLOGUE OF THE LIBERAL AND THE POET
LIBERAL
I meant seawater; you thought I meant hope.
POET
Hell, I reckon you think I am a dope.
LIBERAL
I didn't say that; I said there was no place.
POET
If not in a place, where are the People weeping?
LIBERAL
They creep weeping in the lace, not place.
POET
Is it something with which we may cope
The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the
peeping?
LIBERAL
Hanging is something which I will do with this
rope.
POET
Alas, for us who peep, weeping.
Alas, for us you see but little hope.
[ 93 ]
ECLOGUE OF THE LIBERAL AND THE POET
LIBERAL
Alas, I didn't say that; you rhymed hope with rope.
I meant I was going to hang us both for creeping.
POET
Afterwards they could process us into soap;
Afterwards they would rhyme soap with hope.
BOTH
What a cheerful rhyme! Clean not mean!
Been not seenl Not tired expired!
We must now decide about place.
We decide that place is the big weeping face
And the other abstract lace of the race.
LIBERAL
Shepherd, what are we talking about?
POET
Oh, why, shepherd, are we stalking about?
[ 94]
ODE TO OUR YOUNG PRO-CONSULS
OF THE AIR
To St. John Perse
Once more the country calls
From sleep, as from his doom,
Each citizen to take
His modest stake
Where the sky falls
With a Pacific boom.
Warm winds in even climes
Push southward angry bees
As we, with tank and plane,
Wrest land and main
From yellow mimes,
The puny Japanese.
Boys hide in lunging cubes
Crouching to explode,
Beyond Atlantic skies,
With cheerful cries
Their barking tubes
Upon the German toad.
[95]
OUR YOUNG PRO-CONSULS OF THE AIR
Marvelling day by day
Upon the human kind
What might I have
(A poet alone)
To balk or slay
These enemies of mind?
I sought by night to foal
Chimeras into men-
Decadence of power
That, at late hour,
Untimed the soul
To live the past again:
Toy sword, three-cornered hat
At York and Lexington-
While Bon-Homme whipped at sea
This enemy
Whose roar went flat
After George made him run;
[ 96 ]
OUR YOUNG PRO-CONSULS OF THE AIR
Toy rifle, leather hat
Above the boyish beard
And in that Blue renown
The Gray went down,
Down like a rat,
And even the rats cheered.
In a much later age
(Europe had been in flames)
Proud Wilson yielded ground
To franc and pound,
Made pilgrimage
In the wake of Henry James.
Where Lou Quatorze held fSte
For sixty thousand men,
France took the German sword
But later, bored,
Opened the gate
To Hitler at Comptegne.
[ 97 1
OUR YOUNG PRO-CONSULS OF THE AIR
In this bad time no part
The poet took, nor chance:
He studied Swift and Donne,
Ignored the Hun,
While with faint heart
Proust caused the fall of France.
Sad day at Oahu
When the Jap beetle hitl
Our Proustian retort
Was Kimmel and Short,
Old women in blue,
And then the beetle bit.
It was defeat, or near itl
Yet all that feeble time
Brave Brooks and lithe MacLeish
Had sworn to thresh
Our flagging spirit
With literature made Prime!
I 98 J
OUR YOUNG PRO-CONSULS OF THE AIR
Cow Creek and bright Bear Wallow,
Nursing the blague that dulls
Spirits grown Eliotic,
Now patriotic
Are: we follow
The Irresponsiblesl
Young men, Americans!
You go to win the world
With zeal pro-consular
For our whole star
You partisans
Of liberty unfurled!
O animal excellence,
Take pterodactyl flight
Fire-winged into the air
And find your lair
With cunning sense
On some Arabian bight
[ 99]
OUR YOUNG PRO-CONSULS OF THE AIR
Or sleep your dreamless sleep
( Reptilian bomber! ) by
The Mediterranean
And like a man
Swear you to keep
Faith with imperial eye:
Take off, O gentle youth,
And coasting India
Scale crusty Everest
Whose mythic crest
Resists your truth;
And spying far away
Upon the Tibetan plain
A limping caravan,
Dive, and exterminate
The Lama, late
Survival of old pain.
Go kill the dying swan.
[ 100 ]
IT
ll_
ODE TO FEAR
Variation on a Theme by Collins
Let the day glare: O memory, your tread
Beats to the pulse of suffocating night-
Night peering from his dark but fire-lit head
Burns on the day his tense and secret light.
Now they dare not to gloss your savage dream,
O beast of the heart, those saints who cursed your
name;
You are the current of the frozen stream,
Shadow invisible, ambushed and vigilant flame.
My eldest companion present in solitude,
Watch-dog of Thebes when the blind hero strove:
You, omniscient, at the cross-roads stood
When Laius, the slain dotard, drenched the grove.
Now to the eye of prophecy immune,
Fading and harried, you stalk us in the street
From the recesses of the August noon,
Alert world over, crouched on the air's feet.
[ 103 ]
ODE TO FEAR
You are our surety to immortal life,
God's hatred of the universal stain
The heritage, O Fear, of ancient strife
Compounded with the tissue of the vein.
And I when all is said have seen your form
Most agile and most treacherous to the world
When, on a child's long day, a dry storm
Burst on the cedars, lit by the sun and hurled!
[ 104]
THE TRAVELLER
To Archibald MacLeish
The afternoon with heavy hours
Lies vacant on the wanderer's sight
And sunset waits whose cloudy towers
Expect the legions of the night
Till sullen thunder from the cave
Of twilight with deliberate swell
Whispers the air his darkening slave
To loose the nether bolts of hell
To crush the battlements of cloud
The wall of light around the West
So that the swarming dark will crowd
The traveller upon his quest
And all the air with heavy hours
Sinks on the wanderer's dull sight
And the thick dark whose hidden towers
Menace his travel to the night
[ 105 ]
THE TRAVELLER
Rolls forward, backward hill to hill
Until the seeker knows not where
Beyond the shade of Peachers' Mill
In the burnt meadow, with colourless hair
The secret ones around a stone
Their lips withdrawn in meet surprise
Lie still, being naught but bone
With naught but space within their eyes
Until bewildered by the road
And half -forgetful of his quest
The wanderer with such a load
Of breathing, being too late a guest
Turns back, so near the secret stone,
Falls down breathless at last and blind,
And a dark shift within the bone
Brings him the end he could not find.
[ 106 ]
THE OATH
It was near evening, the room was cold
Half dark; Uncle Ben's brass bullet-mould
And powder-horn and Major Bogan's face
Above the fire in the half-light plainly said:
There's naught to kill but the animated dead.
Horn nor mould nor major follows the chase.
Being cold I urged Lytle to the fire
In the blank twilight with not much left untold
By two old friends when neither's a great liar.
We sat down evenly in the smoky chill.
There's precious little to say between day and dark,
Perhaps a few words on the implacable will
Of time sailing like a magic barque
Or something as fine for the amenities,
Till dusk seals the window, the fire grows bright,
And the wind saws the hill with a swarm of bees.
Now meditating a little on the firelight
We heard the darkness grapple with the night
And give an old man's valedictory wheeze
From his westward breast between his polar jaws;
[ 107 ]
THE OATH
Then Lytle asked: Who are the dead?
Who are the living and the dead?
And nothing more was said.
So I, leaving Lytle to that dream,
Decided what it is in time that gnaws
The ageing fury of a mountain stream
When suddenly as an ignorant mind will do
I thought I heard the dark pounding its head
On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Then Lytle turned with an oath By God it's true!
108]
DITTY
The moon will run all consciences to cover,
Night is now the easy peer of day;
Little boys no longer sight the plover
Streaked in the sky, and cattle go
Warily out in search of misty hay.
Look at the blackbird, the pretty eager swallow,
The buzzard, and all the birds that sail
With the smooth essential flow
Of time through men, who fail.
For now the moon with friendless light carouses
On hill and housetop, street and marketplace,
Men will plunge, mile after mile of men,
To crush this lucent madness of the face,
Go home and put their heads upon the pillow,
Turn with whatever shift the darkness cleaves,
Tuck in their eyes, and cover
The flying dark with sleep like falling leaves.
[ 109 ]
THE WOLVES
There are wolves in the next room waiting
With heads bent low, thrust out, breathing
At nothing in the dark; between them and me
A white door patched with light from the hall
Where it seems never (so still is the house)
A man has walked from the front door to the stair.
It has all been forever. Beasts claw the floor.
I^have brooded on angels and archfiends
But no man has ever sat where the next room's
Crowded with wolves, and for the honor of man
I affirm that never have I before. Now while
I have looked for the evening star at a cold window
And whistled when Arcturus spilt his light,
I've heard the wolves scuffle, and said: So this
Is man; sowhat better conclusion is there
The day will not follow night, and the heart
Of man has a little dignity, but less patience
Than a wolf's, and a duller sense that cannot
Smell its own mortality. (This and other
Meditations will be suited to other times
[ no ]
THE WOLVES
After dog silence howls his epitaph.)
Now remember courage, go to the door,
Open it and see whether coiled on the bed
Or cringing by the wall, a savage beast
Maybe with golden hair, with deep eyes
Like a bearded spider on a sunlit floor
Will snarl and man can never be alone.
[ in i
THE SUBWAY
Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell
Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red
Reverberance of hail upon the dead
Thunder like an exploding crucible!
Harshly articulate, musical steel shell
Of angry worship, hurled religiously
Upon your business of humility
Into the iron forestries of hell:
Till broken in the shift of quieter
Dense altitudes tangential of your steel,
I am become geometries, and glut
Expansions like a blind astronomer
Dazed, while the worldless heavens bulge and reel
In the cold revery of an idiot.
[ 112]
THE EAGLE
Say never the strong heart
In the consuming breath
Cries out unto the dark
The skinny death.
Look! whirring on the rind
Of aether a white eagle,
Shot out of the mind,
The windy apple, burning,
Hears no more, past compass
In his topless flight,
The apple wormed, blown up
By shells of light;
So, faggot of the heart
On the cinder day
The woman and the man!
David and Sybil say
[ 113 ]
THE EAGLE
The world has a season
Under the world's might:
Now in deep autumn-
Black apple in the night.
Think not the world spins ever
(Only the world has a year)
Only the gaunt fierce bird
Flies, merciless with fear
Lest air hold him not,
Beats up the scaffold of space
Sick of the world's rot-
God's hideous face.
[ 114 ]
LAST DAYS OF ALICE
Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,
Declines upon her lost and twilight age;
Above in the dozing leaves the grinning cat
Quivers forever with his abstract rage:
Whatever light swayed on the perilous gate
Forever sways, nor will the arching grass,
Caught when the world clattered, undulate
In the deep suspension of the looking-glass.
Bright Alice! always pondering to gloze
The spoiled cruelty she had meant to say
Gazes learnedly down her airy nose
At nothing, nothing thinking all the day.
Turned absent-minded by infinity
She cannot move unless her double move,
The All-Alice of the world's entity
Smashed in the anger of her hopeless love,
[ 115 ]
LAST DAYS OF ALICE
Love for herself who, as an earthly twain,
Pouted to join her two in a sweet one;
No more the second lips to kiss in vain
The first she broke, plunged through the glass alone-
Alone to the weight of impassivity,
Incest of spirit, theorem of desire,
Without will as chalky cliffs by the sea,
Empty as the bodiless flesh of fire:
All space, that heaven is a dayless night,
A nightless day driven by perfect lust
For vacancy, in which her bored eyesight
Stares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.
We too back to the world shall never pass
Through the shattered door, a dumb shade-harried
crowd
Being all infinite, function depth and mass
Without figure, a mathematical shroud
Hurled at the air blessed without sin!
O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath,
Let us be evil could we enter in
Your grace, and falter on the stony path!
THE TWELVE
There by some wrinkled stones round a leafless tree
With beards askew, their eyes dull and wild
Twelve ragged men, the council of charity
Wandering the face of the earth a fatherless child,
Kneel, at their infidelity aghast,
For where was it, somewhere in Syria
Or Palestine when the streams went red,
The victor of Rome, his arms outspread,
His eyes cold with his inhuman ecstasy,
Cried the last word, the accursed last
Of the forsaken that seared the western heart
With the fire of the wind, the thick and the fast
Whirl of the damned in the heavenly storm:
Now the wind's empty and the twelve living dead
Look round them for that promontory Form
Whose mercy flashed from the sheet lightning's head;
But the twelve lie in the sand by the dry rock
Seeing nothingthe sand, the tree, rocks
Without number and turn away the face
To the mind's briefer and more desert place.
THE TROUT MAP
The Management Area of Cherokee
National Forest, interested in fish,
Has mapped Tellico and Bald Rivers
And North River, with the tributaries
Brookshire Branch and Sugar Cove Creek:
A fishy map for facile fishery
In Marvel's kind Ocean: drawn in two
Colors, blue and red blue for the hue
Of Europe (Tennessee water is green),
Red lines by blue streams to warn
The fancy-fishmen from protected fish;
Black borders hold the Area in a cracked dish,
While other blacks, the dots and dashes, wire
The fisher's will through classic laurel
Over boar tracks to creamy pot-holes lying
Under Bald falls that thump the shying
Trout: we flew Professor, the Hackles and Worms.
(Tom Bagley and I were dotted and dashed wills.)
Up Green Cove gap from Preacher Millsap's cabin
We walked a confident hour of victory,
[ 118]
THE TROUT MAP
Sloped to the west on a trail that led us
To Bald River where map and scene were one
In seen-identity. Eight trout is the story
In three miles. We came to a rock-bridge
On which the road went left around a hill,
The river, right, tumbled into a cove;
But the map dashed the road along the stream
And we dotted man's fishiest enthymeme
With jellied feet upon understanding love
Of what eyes see not, that nourishes the will:
We were fishers, weren't we? And tried to fish
The egoed belly's dry cartograph
Which made the government fish lie down and laugh.
(Tommy and I listened, we heard them shake
Mountain and cove because the map was fake.)
After eighteen miles our feet were clownish,
Then darkness took us into wheezing straits
Where coarse Magellan idling with his fates
Ran with the gulls for map around the Horn,
Or wheresoever the mind with tidy scorn
Revisits the world upon a dry sunbeam.
Now mapless the mountains were a dream.
[ 119 ]
THE MEANING OF LIFE
A Monologue
Think about it at will: there is that
Which is the commentary; there's that other,
Which may be called the immaculate
Conception of its essence in itself.
It is necessary to distinguish the weights
Of the two methods lest the first smother
The second, the second be speechless (without the
first).
,1 was saying this more briefly the other day
But one must be explicit as well as brief.
When I was a small boy I lived at home
For nine years in that part of old Kentucky
Where the mountains fringe the Blue Grass,
The old men shot at one another for luck;
It made me think I was like none of them.
At twelve I was determined to shoot only
For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all;
[ 120 ]
THE MEANING OF LIFE
I know at thirty-three that one must shoot
As often as one gets the rare chance-
In killing there is more than commentary.
One's sense of the proper decoration alters
But there's a kind of lust feeds on itself
Unspoken to, unspeaking; subterranean
As a black river full of eyeless fish
Heavy with spawn; with a passion for time
Longer than the arteries of a cave.
[ 121 ]
THE MEANING OF DEATH
An After-Dinner Speech
I rise, gentlemen, it is the pleasant hour.
Darkness falls. The night falls.
"
Time, fall no more.
Let that be life time falls no more. The threat
Of time we in our own courage have forsworn.
Let light fall, there shall be eternal light
And all the light shall on our heads be worn
Although at evening clouds infest the sky
Broken at base from which the lemon sun
Pours acid of winter on a useful view-
Four water-towers, two churches, and a river:
These are the sights I give in to at night
When the long covers loose the roving eye
[ 122 ]
THE MEANING OF DEATH
.To find the horror of the day a shape
Of life: we would have more than living sight.
Past delusions are seen as if it all
Were yesterday flooded with lemon light,
Vice and virtue, hard sacrifice and crime
In the cold vanity of time.
Tomorrow
The landscape will respond to jocund day,
Bright roofs will scintillate with hues of May
And Phoebus' car, his daily circuit run,
Brings me to the year when, my time begun,
I loitered in the backyard by the alley;
When I was a small boy living at home
The dark came on in summer at eight o'clock
For Little Lord Fauntleroy in a perfect frock
By the alley: mother took him by the ear
To teach of the mixed modes an ancient fear.
Forgive me if I am personal.
Gentlemen, let's
Forget the past, its related errors, coarseness
Of parents, laxities, unrealities of principle.
[ 123 ]
THE MEANING OF DEATH
Think of tomorrow. Make a firm postulate
Of simplicity in desire and act
Founded on the best hypotheses;
Desire to eat secretly, alone, lest
Ritual corrupt our charity,
Lest darkness fall and time fall
In a long night when learned arteries
Mounting the ice and sum of barbarous time
Shall yield, without essence, perfect accident.
We are the eyelids of defeated caves.
[ 124 ]
THE CROSS
There is a place that some men know,
I cannot see the whole of it
Nor how I came there. Long ago
Flame burst out of a secret pit
Crushing the world with such a light
The day-sky fell to moonless black,
The kingly sun to hateful night
For those, once seeing, turning back:
For love so hates mortality
Which is the providence of life
She will not let it blessed be
But curses it with mortal strife,
Until beside the blinding rood
Within that world-destroying pit
Like young wolves that have tasted blood,
Of death, men taste no more of it.
So blind, in so severe a place
(All life before in the black grave)
[ 125 ]
THE CROSS
The last alternatives they face
Of life, without the life to save,
Being from all salvation weaned
A stag charged both at heel and head:
Who would come back is turned a fiend
Instructed by the fiery dead.
[ 126 ]
"*"""
VI
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
I
Now twenty-four or maybe twenty-five
Was the woman's age, and her white brow was sleek;
Lips parted in surprise, the flawless cheek;
The long brown hair coiled sullenly alive;
Her hands, dropt in her lap, could not arrive
At the novel on the table, being weak;
Nor breath, expunger of the mortal streak
Of nature, its own tenement contrive;
For look you how her body stiffly lies
Just as she left it, unprepared to stay,
The posture waiting on the sleeping eyes,
While the body's life, deep as a covered well,
Instinctive as the wind, busy as May,
Burns out a secret passageway to hell.
[ 129 ]
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
II
There is not anything to say to those
Speechless, who have stood up white to the eye
All night till day, harrying the game too close,
Quarries the perils that at midnight lie
Waiting for those who hope to mortify
With foolish daylight their most anxious fear,
A bloodless and white fear that she may die
In the hushed room, and leave them soundless here:
There is no word that death can find to say
Deeper than life, savager than their time.
When Gabriel's trumpet ends all life's delay,
Will crash the beams of firmamental woe:
Not nature will sustain the even crime
Of death, though death sustains all nature, so.
[ 130 ]
DEATH OF LITTLE BOYS
When little boys grown patient at last, weary,
Surrender their eyes immeasurably to the night,
The event will rage terrific as the sea;
Their bodies fill a crumbling room with light.
Then you will touch at the bedside, torn in two,
Gold curls now deftly intricate with gray
As the windowpane extends a fear to you
From one peeled aster drenched with the wind all
day.
And over his chest the covers in the ultimate dream
Will mount to the teeth, ascend the eyes, press back
The locks while round his sturdy belly gleam
Suspended breaths, white spars above the wreck:
Till all the guests, come in to look, turn down
Their palms, and delirium assails the cliff
Of Norway where you ponder, and your little town
Reels like a sailor drunk in a rotten skiff.
The bleak sunshine shrieks its chipped music then
Out to the milkweed amid the fields of wheat.
There is a calm for you where men and women
Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
[ 131 ]
THE ANABASIS
In Mem. L. N. L. Ob. MCMXXXII
Noble beyond degree
In a democracy:
Slight woman whose spent grace
Banishes their vision
To the thin trackless air,
Stop now upon the stair
As they have seen you do
Meridional and true,
And with nut-brown hair
Restore location
To them now blinded quite
By the grave s after-light,
For unless it be done
The slave heart all alone
Strives tunelessly
To go where you are gone
Whether to vaults of air,
[ 132 ]
THE ANABASIS
Imponderable nowhere,
Or the reducing sea
The regions that are fair
Beyond heart's mastery.
They try your form to see
(Its lineless agony)
In our philosophy
Which stops, as cold and bare
As headless hair,
As lifeless as your bones,
Obtuse as meadow stones:
Re-corporated be!
(They cry you in despair)
Lest we, a blind race,
Imitate mortality
For all our living's pace,
And drawn into the bliss
Of your dispersed face
Should join, before our place,
Death's long anabasis.
[ 133 ]
SHADOW AND SHADE
The shadow streamed into the wall
The wall, break-shadow in the blast;
We lingered wordless while a tall
Shade enclouded the shadow's cast.
The torrent of the reaching shade
Broke shadow into all its parts,
What then had been of shadow made
Found exigence in fits and starts
Where nothing properly had name
Save that still element the air,
Burnt sea of universal frame
In which impounded now we were:
I took her hand, I shut her eyes
And all her shadow cleft with shade,
Shadow was crushed beyond disguise
But, being fear, was unafraid.
[ 134 ]
SHADOW AND SHADE
I asked fair shadow at my side:
What more shall fiery shade require?
We lay long in the immense tide
Of shade and shadowy desire
And saw the dusk assail the wall,
The black surge, mounting, crash the stone!
Companion of this lust, we fall,
I said, lest we should die alone.
[ 135 ]
PASTORAL
The enquiring fields, courtesies
And tribulations of the air-
Be still and give them peace;
The girl in the gold hair
With her young man in clover
In shadow of the day's glare
And there they were by the river
Where a leafs light interval
Ringed the deep hurrying mirror;
Yet naught there to befall
Such meditations as beguile
Courage when love grows tall
For tall he was in green style
Of a willow shaking the pool.
"Let time be quiet as a mile/'
[ 136 ]
PASTORAL
He said, "time is love's fool."
Yet time he would appease:
"Time, be easy and cool."
The enquiring courtesies
Of first dusk then debated
To cloud their agonies:
She, her head back, waited
Barbarous the stalking tide;
He, nor balked nor sated
But plunged into the wide
Area of mental ire,
Lay at her wandering side.
I 137 ]
MR. POPE
When Alexander Pope strolled in the city
Strict was the glint of pearl and gold sedans.
Ladies leaned out more out of fear than pity
For Pope's tight back was rather a goat's than man's.
Often one thinks the urn should have more bones
Than skeletons provide for speedy dust,
The urn gets hollow, cobwebs brittle as stones
Weave to the funeral shell a frivolous rust.
And he who dribbled couplets like a snake
Coiled to a lithe precision in the sun
Is missing. The jar is empty; you may break
It only to find that Mr. Pope is gone.
What requisitions of a verity
Prompted the wit and rage between his teeth
One cannot say. Around a crooked tree
A moral climbs whose name should be a wreath.
r iss i
TO A ROMANTIC
(1924)
To Robert Penn Warren
You hold your eager head
Too high in the air, you walk
As if the sleepy dead
Had never fallen to drowse
From the sublimest talk
Of many a vehement house.
Your head so turned turns eyes
Into the vagrant West;
Fixing an iron mood
In an Ozymandias* breast
And because your clamorous blood
Beats an impermanent rest
You think the dead arise
Westward and fabulous:
The dead are those whose lies
Were doors to a narrow house.
[ 139 ]
UNNATURAL LOVE
Landor, not that I doubt your word,
That you had strove with none
At seventy-five and had deferred
To nature and art alone;
It is rather that at thirty-two
From us I see them part
After they served, so sweetly, you
Yet nature has no heart:
Brother and sister are estranged
By his ambitious lies
For he his sister Helen much deranged-
Outraged her, and put coppers on her eyes.
[ 140 ]
THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM
(Talk between Bird and Girl)
Turn back. Turn, young lady dear
A murderer's house you enter here
1 was wooed and won little bird
( I have watched them come bright girls
Out of the rising sun, with curls)
The stair is tall the cellar deep
The wind coughs in the halls
/ never wish to sleep
From the ceiling the sky falls
It will press you and press you, dear.
It is my desire to fear
(What a childl she desires her fear)
The house is whirling night, the guests
Grains of dust from the northwest
f 141 1
THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM
I do not come for rest
There is no rest for the dead
Ready for the couch of mij groom
In a long room beneath the dew
Where the walls embrace and cling.
/ wear my wedding ring
He will cut off your finger
And the blood will linger
Little bird!
[ 142 ]
THE PROGRESS OF (ENIA
His dim, ut fama est, vitiis ad proelia ventum est,
his Troiana vides funera principiis. PROPERTIUS.
I. MADRIGALE
Seed in your heart, warm dust transmuted
Gold, blooms in flakes of radiance
Arched in your face whereon my days,
Brinks of silence, glance.
Dream-emptied by some shifting
Monna Bice, you I resume:
Continually suffer the habitual
Cobra of my slightest glooml
Release the happy hounds that trace
New smiles from the scampering wood
Of winter laughters new prints of light
And trace them to your facel
[ 143 ]
THE PROGRESS OF CENIA
II. IN WINTERTIME
I would not give the winter for a rose.
For remembering gold meadows and the hummer
Sucking them, I think June a time of pillage.
Your mouth is more passionate than any summer.
They say the spring holds many grapes
And green promises of fruit in the summer.
Give me your lips, (Enia, and let winter seas
Lash the cliffs and snows bite the grape.
We shall have passion without the sound of bees.
III. VIGIL
When you are dead and the frosty iron of laughter
Stupendously settles its pride upon your lips,
I will gather up the whispers you came after
When we first met, of immutable dissimulation.
If you are dead when the wind cries again
Over the bleak gables of an expected hour,
I will build a chapel out of the astonished pain
And wait for bells ringing in an empty tower.
[ 144 ]
THE PROGRESS OF (ENIA
IV. DIVAGATION
How many winds forget the sea!
Your dubious intention I forget
And look into the eager waste
Of your eyes careless of yesterday.
What cruel wine, what wayward gust
Tattering sun-hair to shreds of rain,
Swept you an exile to Gyrene
Blown by the swollen winds of pain,
I do not know, for we are dead:
Cluttering our youthful peace
With a various insolence, you laugh
The year, avid of love, to grief!
Our death, that was lonely, you've forgot;
Dawn came to us impatiently
Then went away with an equal fire,
Yet in an instant, in lifted night,
This desolation is alive
With backward motions of bright feet-
Remembering the madness of scaling
A certain dusk to the first small star.
[ 145 ]
THE PROGRESS OF OENIA
V. EPILOGUE TO CENIA
Whatever I have said to praise
Your wrath for me in better days
Than these, when the toughening grass
Fell tenderer for you to pass,
I say again, but differently
As a still wind in a winter tree.
Pardon me! if turning over
In the reminiscence of a lover
The leaves of a desiccate romance,
I can but wonder if a chance
Invasion of a handsomer look
Than mine began you another book?
I shan't devise the same end
For other books unless you send
Me word demanding back your hair,
Do you remember how your hair
Contained both ears? It never hid
Them quite, but climbed to a pyramid
More dazzling than superstitious kings
Set in the sand as their playthings;
[ 146 ]
THE PROGRESS OF CEN1A
And tell me, was it wantonness
Fluttering a diaphanous dress
That night at the Club when polite backs
Jazzed to the midnight cordax
And my veins raced to Seboim:
Not wantonness, but you were slim,
My dear, with a gift that I admired
For always being somehow tired!
Whatever else I say, your breast
Contained the witchery of the rest
Of a body vanished into a thought
If touched too late, or lately caught.
So more than your hair or olive eye
I remember your breast does it still lie
Tactual billows in an upper world
Of superior sculpture, whence you hurled
Volcanic innocence and death
Out of the caverns beneath breath?
(Enia! forgive these sentiments
Of a respectful lover shattered in sense-
Yet sad that the modern bawd, grown dim,
Obscures the hotel cherubim
Whose red neckties had honored this page
[ 147 ]
THE PROGRESS OF CENIA
In a hotter, less barbaric age;
For now the languid stertorous
Pale verses of Propertius
And the sapphire corpse undressed by Donne
( Prefiguring Rimbaud's etymon )
Have shrunk to an apotheosis
Of cold daylight after the kiss.
And since helmets of steel bone rind
The great heads of the Numerous Mind
No glories of your breast and thighs
Shall these poor verses advertise-
Only the dry debility
Of a spent wind in a winter tree.
1922-1923
[ 148 ]
SONNET TO BEAUTY
The wonder of light is your familiar tale,
Pert wench, down to the nineteenth century:
Mr. Rimbaud the Frenchman's apostasy
Asserts the argument that you are stale,
Flat and unprofitable, importunate but paie,
Lithe Corpse! His defect of philosophy
Impugned, but could not strip your entity
Of light. Broken, our twilit visions fail.
Beauty, the doctrine of the incorporate Word
Conceives your fame; how else should you subsist?
The present age, beak southward, flies like a bird
For often at Church I've seen the stained high glass
Pour out the Virgin and Saints, twist and untwist
The mortal youth of Christ astride an ass.
[ 149 ]
LIGHT
Last night I fled until I came
To streets where leaking casements dripped
Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame;
A nervous window bled.
The moon swagged in the air.
Out of the mist a girl tossed
Spittle of song; a hoarse light
Spattered the fog with heavy hair.
Damp bells in a remote tower
Sharply released the throat of God,
I leaned to the erect night
Dead as stiff turf in winter sod.
Then with the careless energy
Of a dream, the forward curse
Of a cold particular eye
In the headlong hearse.
[ 150 ]
HOMILY
// thine eye offend thee, pluck it out
If your tired unspeaking head
Rivet the dark with linear sight,
Crazed by a warlock with his curse
Dreamed up in some loquacious bed,
And if the stage-dark head rehearse
The fifth act of the closing night,
Why, cut it off, piece after piece,
And throw the tough cortex away,
And when you've marvelled on the wars
That wove their interior smoke its way,
Tear out the close vermiculate crease
Where death crawled angrily at bay.
[ 151 ]
LIGHT
Last night I fled until I came
To streets where leaking casements dripped
Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame;
A nervous window bled.
The moon swagged in the air.
Out of the mist a girl tossed
Spittle of song; a hoarse light
Spattered the fog with heavy hair.
Damp bells in a remote tower
Sharply released the throat of God,
I leaned to the erect night
Dead as stiff turf in winter sod.
Then with the careless energy
Of a dream, the forward curse
Of a cold particular eye
In the headlong hearse.
[ 150 ]
HOMILY
// thine eye offend thee, pluck it out
If your tired unspeaking head
Rivet the dark with linear sight,
Ciazed by a warlock with his curse
Dreamed up in some loquacious bed,
And if the stage-dark head rehearse
The fifth act of the closing night,
Why, cut it off, piece after piece,
And throw the tough cortex away,
And when youVe marvelled on the wars
That wove their interior smoke its way,
Tear out the close vermiculate crease
Where death crawled angrily at bay.
[ 151 ]
ART
When you are come by ways emptied of light
You'll say goodby, in that indifferent gloom,
To the quick draughts of old, yet with polite
Anguish of pride recall as an heirloom
A dawn when stars dropped gold about your head
And, so amazed, you knew not were you dead.
For, brother, know that this is art, and you
With a cold incautious sorrow stricken dumb,
Have your own vanishing slit of light let through,
Passionate as winter, where only a few may come:
Not idiots in the street find out the lees
In the last drink of dying Socrates.
[ 152 ]
IGNIS FATUUS
In the twilight of my audacity
I saw you flee the world, the burnt highways
Of summer gave up their light: I
Followed you with the uncommon span
Of fear-supported and disbursed eyes.
Towards the dark that harries the tracks
Of dawn I pursued you only. I fell
Companionless. The seething stacks
Of cornstalks, the rat-pillaged meadow
Censured the lunar interior of the night.
/
High in what hills, by what illuminations
Are you intelligible? Your fierce latinity
Beyond the nubian bulwark of the sea
Sustains the immaculate sight.
To the green tissue of the subterranean
Worm I have come back, two-handed from
The chase, and empty. I have pondered it
Carefully, and asked: Where is the light
When the pigeon moults his ease
Or exile utters the creed of memory?
[ 153 ]
IDIOT
The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes,
The meadow creeps implacable and still;
A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies.
One two three the cows bulge on the hill.
Motion that is not time erects snowdrifts
While sister's hand sieves waterfalls of lace.
With a palm fan closer than death he lifts
The Ozarks and tilted seas across his face.
In the long sunset where impatient sound
Strips niggers to a multiple of backs
Flies yield their heat, magnolias drench the ground
With Appomattoxl The shadows lie in stacks.
The julep glass weaves echoes in Jim's kinks
While ashy Jim puts murmurs in the day;
Now in the idiot's heart a chamber stinks
Of dead asters, as the potter's field of May.
[ 157 ]
IDIOT
All evening the marsh is a slick pool
Where dream wild hares, witch hazel, pretty girls.
"Up from the important picnic of a fool
Those rotted asters!" Eddy on eddy swirls
The innocent mansion of a panthers heart!
It crumbles, tick-tick time drags it in
Till now his arteries lag and now they start
Reverence with the frigid gusts of sin.
The stillness pelts the eye, assaults the hair;
4 beech sticks out a branch to warn the stars,
A lightening-bug jerks angles in the air,
Diving. "I am the captain of new wars!"
The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail;
Far off a precise whistle is escheat
To the dark; and then the towering weak and pale
Covers his eyes with memory like a sheet.
[ 158 ]
A PAUPER
and the children's teeth shall be set on edge.
I see him old, trapped in a burly house
Cold in the angry spitting of a rain
Come down these sixty years.
Why vehemently
Astride the threshold do I wait, marking
The ice softly pendent on his broken temple?
Upon the silence I cast the mesh of rancor
By which the gentler convergences of the flesh
Scatter untokened, mercilessly estopped.
Why so illegal these tears?
The years' incertitude and
The dirty white fates trickling
Blackly down the necessary years
Define no attitude to the present winter,
No mood to the cold matter.
[ 159 ]
A PAUPER
(I remember my mother, my mother,
A stiff wind halted outside,
In the hard ear my country
Was a far shore crying
With invisible seas )
When tomorrow pleads the mortal decision
Sifting rankly out of time's sieve today,
No words differently will be uttered
Nor stuttered, like sheep astray.
A pauper in the swift denominating
Of a bald cliff with a proper name, having words
As strumpets only, I cannot beat off
Invincible modes of the sea, hearing:
Be a man my son by God.
He turned again
To the purring jet yellowing the murder story,
Deaf to the pathos circling in the air.
[ 160 ]
OBITUARY
In memory of S. B. V., 1834-1909
... so what the lame four-poster gathered here
Between the lips of stale and seasoned sheets
Startles a memory sunlit upon the wall
(Motors and urchins contest the city streets)
While towards the bed the rigid shadows lean
Stung to the patience of all emptiness
And the bed empty where she kept,
Jerky gnats lunge at the haggard screen.
And now upstairs the lint that crusts the sills
Erodes in a windy shift along the floor.
Shall now her touselled eyes rinse out the haze
Of winter sprawled like a waif outside the door?
[ 161 ]
OBITUARY
Feet answer: alternate and withdrawn
To the hard ease of lacquered pine that clamps
The shuffled fists into the breast and neck.
Time begins to elucidate her bones
Then you, so crazy and inviolate,
Will finger the console with a fearful touch,
Go past the horsehair sofa, the gilded frames
Whose faces are tired names
For the lifeblood that labors you so much.
f 162
EMBLEMS
Maryland, Virginia, Caroline
Pent images in sleep
Clay valleys rocky hills old fields of pine
Unspeakable and deep
Out of that source of time my farthest blood
Runs strangely to this day
Unkempt the fathers waste in solitude
Under the hills of clay
Far from their woe fled to its thither side
To a river in Tennessee
In an alien house I will stay
Yet find their breath to be
All that my stars betide-
There some time to abide
Took wife and child with me,
[ 163 ]
EMBLEMS
II
When it is all over and the blood
Runs out, do not bury this man
By the far river (where never stood
His fathers) flowing to the West,
But take him East where life began.
my brothers, there is rest
In the depths of an eastward river
That I can understand; only
Do not think the truth we hold
1 hold the slighter for this lonely
Reservation of the heart:
Men cannot live forever
But they must die forever
So take this body at sunset
To the great stream whose pulses start
In the blue hills, and let
These ashes drift from the Long Bridge
Where only a late gull breaks
That deep and populous grave.
[ 164 ]
EMBLEMS
HI
By the great river the forefathers to beguile
Them, being inconceivably young, carved out
Deep hollows of memory on a river isle
Now losttheir murmur the ghost of a shout
In the hollows where the forefathers
Without beards, their faces bright and long,
Lay down at sunset by the cool river
In the tall willows amid birdsong;
And the long sleep by the cool river
They've slept full and long, till now the air
Waits twilit for their echo; the burning shiver
Of August strikes like a hawk the crouching hare.
[ 165 ]
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
What is the flesh and blood compounded of
But a few moments in the life of time?
This prowling of the cells, litigious love,
Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.
Consider the first settlers of our bone,
Observe how busily they sued the dust,
Estopped forever by the last dusted stone.
It is a pity that two brothers must
Perceive a canker of perennial flower
To make them brothers in mortality:
Perfect this treason to the murderous hour
If you would win the hard identity
Of brothers a long race for men to run
Nor quite achieved when the perfection's won.
II
Near to me as perfection in the blood
And more mysterious far, is this, my brother:
[ 166 ]
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
A light vaulted into your solitude.
It studied burns lest you its rage should smother.
It is a flame obscure to any eyes,
Most like the fire that warms the deepest grave
(The cold grave is the deepest of our lies)
To which our blood is the indentured slave:
The fire that burns most secretly in you
Does not expend you hidden and alone,
The studious fire consumes not one, but two
Me also, marrowing the self-same bone.
Our property in fire is death in life
Flawing the rocky fundament with strife.
Ill
Then, brother, you would never think me vain
Or rude, if I should mention dignity;
Think little of it. Dignity's the stain
Of mortal sin that knows humility.
Let me design the hour when you were born
Since, if that's vain, it's only childlike so:
Like an attempting frost on April corn
Considerate death would hardly let you go.
[ 167 ]
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
Reckon the costif you would validate
Once more our slavery to circumstance
Not by contempt of a prescriptive fate
But in your bearing towards an hour of chance.
It is a part so humble and so proud
You'll think but little of it in your shroud.
IV
The times have changed. Why do you make a fuss
For privilege when there's no law of form?
Who of our kin was pusillanimous,
A fine bull galloping into a storm?
Why, none; unless you count it arrogance
To cultivate humility in pride,
To look but casually and half-askance
On boots and spurs that went a devil's ride.
There was, remember, a Virginian
Who took himself to be brute nature's law,
Cared little what men thought him, a tall man
Who meditated calmly what he saw
Until he freed his Negroes, lest he be
Too strict with nature and than they less free.
[ 168 ]
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
Our elder brother whom we had not seen
These twenty years until you brought him back
From the cyclonic West, where he had been
Sent by the shaking fury in the track
We know so well, wound in these arteries:
You, other brother, I have become strange
To you, and you must study ways to seize
Mortality, that knows how to derange
Corpuscles for designs that it may choose;
Your blood is altered by the sudden death
Of one who of all persons could not use
Life half so well as death. Let's look beneath
That life. Perhaps hers only is our rest-
To study this, all lifetime may be best.
VI
The fire I praise was once perduring flame--
Till it snuffs with our generation out;
No matter, it's all one, it's but a name
Not as late honeysuckle half so stout;
[ 169 ]
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
So think upon it how the fire burns blue,
Its hottest, when the flame is all but spent;
Thank God the fuel is low, well not renew
That length of flame into our firmament;
Think too the rooftree crackles and will fall
On us, who saw the sacred fury's height-
Seated in her tall chair, with the black shawl
From head to foot, burning with motherly light
More spectral than November dusk could mix
With sunset, to blaze on her pale crucifix.
VII
This message hastens lest we both go down
Scattered, with no character, to death;
Death is untutored, with an ignorant frown
For precious identities of breath.
But you perhaps will say confusion stood,
A vulture, near the heart of all our kin:
I've heard the echoes in a dark tangled wood
Yet never saw I a face peering within.
These evils being anonymities,
We fulminate, in exile from the earth,
[ 170 ]
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
Aged exclusions of blood memories
Those superstitions of explosive birth;
Until there'll be of us not anything
But foolish death, who is confusion's king.
VIII
Not power nor the casual hand of God
Shall keep us whole in our dissevering air,
It is a stink upon this pleasant sod
So foul, the hovering buzzard sees it fair;
I ask you will it end therefore tonight
And the moth tease again the windy flame,
Or spiders, eating their loves, hide in the night
At last, drowsy with self-devouring shame?
Call it the house of Atreus where we live
Which one of us the Greek perplexed with crime
Questions the future: bring that lucid sieve
To strain the appointed particles of time!
Whether by Corinth or by Thebes we go
The way is brief, but the fixed doom, not so.
[ 171 ]
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
IX
Captains of industry, your aimless power
Awakens harsh velleities of time:
Let you, brother, captaining your hour
Be zealous that your numbers are all prime,
Lest false division with sly mathematic
Plunder the inner mansion of the blood,
The Thracian, swollen with pride, besiege the Attic-
Invader foraging the sacred wood:
Yet the prime secret whose simplicity
Your towering engine hammers to reduce,
Though driven, holds that bulwark of the sea
Which breached will turn unspeaking fury loose
To drown out him who swears to rectify
Infinity, that has nor ear nor eye.
[ 172 ]
TRANSLATIONS
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
(PERVIGILIUM VENERIS)
Introductory Note
Few people today read the Pervigilium Veneris,
and I doubt that it was ever widely read. Those of
us who had some of the classical education which
was still more or less compulsory in the colleges
twenty-five years ago, did not read it in the Latin
classes. Late Latin of the Decadence did not appear
conspicuously in undergraduate "courses," the pur-
pose of which was to hold up models of "purity"
in the language and not to explore the range of
the Latin sensibility in poetry. I came upon the
poem, I think in 1917, in the usual way, in Marius
the Epicurean, where Pater gives us a somewhat
overdone reconstruction of the circumstances of its
origin. I looked up the Latin text and was disap-
pointed. I was still too close to Swinburne in my
adolescent revolt against his influence to read
[ 175]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
properly any poem about pagan love; I read the
Pervigilium with Swinburne's sensibility, and heard
it in his language, having then at any rate neither
sensibility nor language of my own; and I disliked it.
I did not look at the poem again until 1930, when
I tried to work out a translation of the famous
refrain. My attempt at this failed.
I go into this personal history in order to say
what is obvious, that most verse is written acci-
dentally, translations not excepted. In the fall of
1942 the refrain of the Pervigilium came back to me
and" for several days kept running through my head;
then I suddenly knew that I "had" it. I had it, that
is to say, in language that somewhat resembled
English and in a metre that the English language
can be written in: plain iambic pentametre, with
anapaestic substitutions for the frequent falling
rhythms of the original. The Latin is in trochaic
septenarii, seven-footed lines with, at the end, an
extra syllable which is usually accented, making
eight accents; the metre, in fact, of Tennyson's
Locksley Hall, which was actually used by some of
the early translators of the Pervigilium. Except for
certain special purposes it is an impossible metre in
[ 176]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
English, for unless the extra accented syllable at the
end is managed with great skill the line will break
down into units of four and three and sound like a
Wesleyan hymn a high price to pay for metrical
fidelity to a foreign original.
The poem is supposed by some scholars to have
been written as early as the reign of Hadrian (A. D.
117-138) by a man named Florus, who was better
known as historian and rhetorician than as poet.
This conjecture is based upon the scholars' feeling
that the poem ought to have been written then,
since under Hadrian the trinoctium of Venus, the
spring ritual of the cult of Dione, or Venus Genetrix,
whom the poem celebrates as the principle of sexual
reproduction in nature, was officially encouraged and
even given the dignity of a state religion. But cer-
tain features of the poem might place it much later,
as late, perhaps, as the Fourth Century. The late
J. W. Mackail saw in it "a certain affinity of style
and spirit" with the Eclogues of Nemesianus of
Carthage (cir. A.D. 285), and an even more strik-
ing resemblance to the fragments of Tiberianus, an-
other African poet, who wrote around A.D. 350.
If I were entitled to an opinion I should side with
[ 177 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
Mackail, for although the simplified syntax and
the stressed verse could have been written as early
as Hadrian, it is not probable that they were: the
language of the poem seems to stand midway be-
tween classical Latin and late vulgar Latin which
toward the end of the empire began to show, in
the levelling oft of the inflectional system, the in-
fluence of the popular and provincial tongues. The
reader of the Pervigilium, who has only a little Latin,
as I have, will observe the occasional rhyme, the
line unit of expression (rare in the poetry of the
Golden Age), the frequent coincidence of quantity
and stress, and even in some instances stress crowd-
ing out the quantities of the vowels.
The delicacy of feeling and the subtlety of the
simple language require little demonstration. There
is, of course, a good deal of merely conventional
stuff, for which there is no equivalent convention
in English; for example, the standard references to
Venus as the founder of Rome. This material, brought
into our language, had to be considerably doctored
in the eighteenth-century manner to make it palat-
able at all. I have not found any scholar or previous
translator who does justice to the restrained humor
[ 178 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
of the lines about Cupid and the virgins. Up to
the last two stanzas the poem is moving, it has its
peculiar subtleties; but it is not brilliant. In those
two last stanzas something like a first-rate lyrical
imagination suddenly appears.
Observe how it works. The "maid of Tereus" is.
the sort of classical parable that we have had
throughout the poem; but here it is not a conven-
tional allusion. The beautiful line:
iam loquaces ore rauco stagna cycni perstrepunt
particularizes the scene about to be presented as
no other scene in the poem has been particularized:
we feel immediately the presence of a dramatic ob-
server, an ear that listens and an eye that sees. Terei
puella is more than a classical allusion; she is a real
bird singing in a real tpoplar tree, answering the
dissonance of the swans as they strike the lake.
Is she Philomela or Procne, swallow or nightin-
gale? Our anonymous poet is not explicit; yet in
the next and last stanza he speaks of the swallow
who has ceased to be silent and can now sing. We
evidently have here the older Greek, not the later
Latin, version of the story of the rape of Philomela,
in which Procne becomes the nightingale, Philomela
[ 179 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
he swallow. (It is perhaps significant that the poet
ises the Greek chelidon instead of the Latin hirundo
: or swallow.) Countless versions of the tale circu-
ated in the ancient world. The brief summary by
\pollodorus, who collected in the Second Century
B.C. virtually all the known Greek myths in a long
iVork that comes down to us as The Library, gives
the story as it must have been most widely known
imong the Greeks:
. . . and having with his help brought the war
to a successful close he (Pandion) gave Tereus his
dwn daughter Procne in marriage. Tereus had by
her a son Itys, and having fallen in love with
Philomela (sister to Procne), he seduced her also
saying that Procne was dead, for he concealed her
in the country. Afterward he married Philomela
and bedded with her and cut out her tongue. But
by weaving characters in a robe she revealed there-
by to Procne her own sorrows. And having sought
out her sister, Procne killed her son Itys, boiled him,
and served him up for supper to the unwitting
Tereus, and fled with her sister. . . . When Tereus
was aware of what had happened, he snatched up
an axe and pursued them. And being overtaken at
Daulia in Phocis, they prayed the gods to be turned
into birds, and Procne became a nightingale and
Philomela a swallow. (Apollodorus, THE LIBRARY,
in, xiv: Loeb Classical Library, pp. 99-100.)
[ 180 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
The late Sir J. G. Frazer, editor of the Loeb text of
Apollodorus, says in a note on this passage: 'The
later Roman mythographers somewhat absurdly in-
verted the transformation of the two sisters, making
Procne the swallow and the tongueless Philomela
the songstress nightingale." While I was translating
the Pervigilium I assumed that our poet had fol-
lowed Ovid's version of the transformation, but upon
looking up the story in the Metamorphoses (VI,
424-675) I found that I had not remembered Ovid
accurately, for he does not tell us what kind of birds
the sisters became; he merely says:
corpora Cecropidum pennis pendere putares:
pendebant pennis.
Yet it must be confessed that the "internal evi-
dence" in favour of the belief that the bird singing
subter umbram populi is Philomela the swallow is
not conclusive. If we translate puella, in the phrase
Terei puella, in the rare sense of wife, the bird is
Procne the nightingale; and we may only surmise
that the poet, when he asks, Quando fiam uti chelidon
ut tacere desinam? is hoping that he may become as
the swallow companion to the nightingale. This
[ 181 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
interpretation has, I think, little to recommend it;
but the reader may take his choice.
The symbolic power of the scene in stanza XXI
is firmly grounded in the dramatic perception of the
poet, whose personality has not previously appeared.
It appears explicitly in stanza XXII, where this long,
gentle meditation on the sources of all life comes
to a climax in the poet's sudden consciousness of
his own feeble powers. When shall I, he says, like
Philomela the swallow, suffer violence and be moved
to sing? It is this unexpected and dramatic ending
that makes, for me, what were otherwise an interest-
ing ritualistic chant, one of the finest of lyric poems.
Perhaps in the Amyclae, the people of the town of
that name in Latium who were called tacitae, and
who, when menaced by an enemy, could not speak
for help and were destroyed, we may see an image
of all "late" people. I like to think that the Amyclae
tacitae were not Latians but lived in the Laconian
town of that name, where Apollo was the tutelary
deity under the surname Amyclaeus, and that having
offended their god, the Laconian Amyclae were
cursed with silence and died of their own emptiness
of song. May we see something of this in the last
[ 182 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
stanza of the poem? If there is any external evidence
for it I have not been able to find it. Yet is the poem
not telling us that the loss of symbolic language
may mean the extinction of our humanity?
The text that I have followed is Mackail's, which
was first published in 1888 and which now appears
in the Loeb Classical Library. Mackail's arrangement
of the corrupt text into quatrains is perhaps a
triumph of textual scholarship. The poem comes
down to us in two badly confused manuscripts in the
Anthologia Latina, a miscellany of short poems of
the Silver Age. In order to bring together material
that seemed to go together, and to improve the
continuity, I have shifted in several instances
Mackail's order of the stanzas, a liberty that seemed
justified by the corruption of the surviving texts; for
no one knows the original order. Where I have
moved a stanza I have indicated in brackets, in the
Latin text, the number of the stanza in Mackail's
arrangement. For the translation of the first line of
stanza XXI I am indebted to my wife; and for
constant criticism, to Robert Lowell.
MONTEAGLE, TENNESSEE
APRIL 27, 1943 A. T.
[ 183 ]
PERVIGIUUM VENERIS
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet:
ver novum, ver iam canorum, ver renatus orbis est,
vere concordant amores, vere nubunt alites,
et nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus.
era* <aet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
II (HI)
eras erit cum primus aether copula vit nuptias:
tune cruore de superno spumeo et ponti globo,
caerulas inter catervas, inter et bipedes equos,
fecit undantem Dionem de maritis imbribus.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
[ 184 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
Tomorrow let loveless, let lover tomorrow make love :
O spring, singing spring, spring of the world renew!
In spring lovers consent and the birds marry
When the grove receives in her hair the nuptial dew.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
II
Tomorrow's the day when the prime Zeus made love:
Out of lightning foam shot deep in the heaving sea
(Witnessed by green crowds of finny horses)
Dione rising and falling, he made to be!
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow
make love.
[ 185 ]
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
III (II)
eras amorum copulatrix inter umbras arborum
implicat casas virentes de flagello myrteo:
eras canoris feriatos ducit in silvis chores;
eras Dione iura dicit fulta sublimi throno.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
IV
ipsa gemmis purpurantem pingit annum floridis;
ipsa turgentes papillas de favoni spiritu
urget in nodos tepentes; ipsa roris lucidi,
noctis aura quern relinquit, spargit umentes aquas.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
emicant lacrimae trementes de caduco pondere,
gutta praeceps orbe parvo sustinet casus suos:
[ 186 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
III
Tomorrow the Joiner of love in the gracious shade
Twines her green huts with boughs of myrtle claws,
Tomorrow leads her gangs to the singing woods: .
Tomorrow Dione, on high, lays down the laws.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
IV
She shines the tarnished year with glowing buds
That, wakening, head up to the western wind
In eager clusters. Goddess! You deign to scatter
Lucent night-drip of dew; for you are kind.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
The heavy teardrops stretch, ready to fall,
Then falls each glistening bead to the earth beneath:
[ 187 1
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
umor ille quern serenis astra rorant noctibus
mane virgines papillas solvit umenti peplo.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
VI
en pudorem florulentae prodiderunt purpurae
et rosarum flamma nodis emicat tepentibus.
ipsa iussit diva vestem de papillis solvere,
ut recenti mane nudae virgines nubant rosae.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
VII
facta Cypridis de cruore deque Amoris osculo,
deque gemmis deque flammis deque solis purpuris,
eras ruborem qui latebat veste tectus ignea
uvido marita nodo non pudebit solvere.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
[ 188 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
The moisture that the serene stars sent down
Loosens the virgin bud from the sliding sheath.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
VI
Look, the high crimsons have revealed their shame.
The burning rose turns in her secret bed,
The goddess has bidden the girdle to loose its folds
That the rose at dawn may give her maidenhead.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
VII
The blood of Venus enters her blood, Love's kiss
Has made the drowsy virgin modestly bold;
Tomorrow the bride is not ashamed to take
The burning taper from its hidden fold.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
[ 189 ]
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
VIII
ipsa nymphas diva luco iiissit ire myrteo:
it puer comes puellis; nee tamen credit potest
esse Amorem feriatum, si sagittas vexerit:
ite nymphae, posuit arma, feriatus est Amor.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
IX
iussusr est inermis ire, nudus ire iussus est,
neu quid arcu neu sagitta neu quid igne laederet
sed tamen cavete nymphae, quod Cupido pulcher
est:
totus est inermis idem quando nudus est Amor.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
X (XIV)
ruris hie erunt puellae vel puellae montium
quaeque silvas quaeque lucos quaeque fontes
incolunt:
[ 190 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
VIII
The goddess herself has sent nymphs to the woods,
The Boy with girls to the myrtles; perhaps you think
That Love's not truly tame if he shows his arrows?
Go, girlsl Unarmed, Love beckons. You must not
shrink.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
IX
Bidden unarmed to go and to go naked
Lest he destroy with bow, with dart, with brand-
Yet, girls, Cupid is pretty, and you must know
That Love unarmed can pierce with naked hand!
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
Here will be girls of the farm and girls of the
mountain
And girls who live by forest, or grove, or spring.
[ 191 ]
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
iussit omnes adsidere mater alitis dei,
iussit et nudo puellas nil Amori credere.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XI
ipsa vellet te rogare, si pudicam flecteret;
ipsa vellet ut venires, si deceret virginem:
iam tribus chores videres feriatos noctibus
congreges inter catervas ire per saltus tuos.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XII (X)
conpari Venus pudore mittit ad te virgines:
una res est quam rogamus, cede virgo Delia,
ut nemus sit incruentum de ferinis stragibus
et recentibus virentes ducat umbras floribus.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
[ 192 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
The mother of the Flying Boy has smiled
And said: Now, girls, beware his naked sting!
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XI
Gently she asks may she bend virginity?
Gently that you, a modest girl, may yield.
Now, should you come, for three nights you would
see
Delirious bands in every grove and field.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XII
Venus herself has maidens as pure as you;
So, Delia, one thing only we ask: Go awayl
That the wood shall not be bloody with slaughtered
beasts
When Venus flicks the shadows with greening spray.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
[ 193]
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
XIII (XII)
floreas inter coronas, myrteas inter casas,
nee Ceres nee Bacchus absunt nee poetarum deus.
de tenente tota nox est perviglanda canticis:
regnet in silvis Dione, tu recede Delia.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XIV (XIII)
iussit Hyblaeis tribunal stare diva floribus;
praeses ipsa iura dicet, adsidebunt Gratiae:
Hybla totos funde flores, quicquid annus adtulit;
Hybla florum sume vestem, quantus Ennae campus
est,
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XV
ut pater totum crearet veris annum nubibus
in sinum maritus imber fluxit almae coniugis,
[ 194 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
XIII
Among the garlands, among the myrtle bowers
Ceres and Bacchus, and the god of verse, delay.
Nightlong the watch must be kept with votive cry
Dione's queen of the woods: Diana, make way! -
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XIV
She places her court among the flowers of Hybla;
Presiding, she speaks her laws; the Graces are near.
Hybla, give all your blossoms, and bring, Hybla,
The brightest plain of Enna for the whole year.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XV
With spring the father-sky remakes the world:
The male shower has flowed into the bride,
[ 195 ]
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
unde fetus perque pontum perque caelum pergeret
perque terras mixtus omnes alere magno corpore.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XVI (XVII)
pervium sui tenorem seminali tramite
perque caelum perque terras perque pontum
subditum
ipsa duxit, ipsa venis procreantem spiritum
inbuit, iussitque mundum nosse nascendi vias.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet
XVII (XVI)
ipsa venas atque mentem permeanti spiritu
intus occultis gubernat procreatrix viribus.
ipsa Troianos nepotes in Latinos transtulit,
Romuleas ipsa fecit cum Sabinis nuptias.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
[ 196 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
Earth's body; then shifted through sky and sea and
land
To touch the quickening child in her deep side.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XVI
Over sky and land and down under the sea
On the path of the seed the goddess brought to
earth
And dropped into our veins created fire,
That men might know the mysteries of birth.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XVII
Body and mind the inventive Creatress fills
With spirit blowing its invariable power:
The Sabine girls she gave to the sons of Rome
And sowed the seed exiled from the Trojan tower.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
[ 197 ]
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
XVIII
ipsa Laurentem puellam coniugem nato dedit,
moxque Marti de sacello dat pudicam virginem,
unde Ramnes et Quirites proque prole posterum
Romulum patrem crearet et nepotem Caesarem.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XIX
rura fecundat voluptas: rura Venerem sentiunt:
ipse Amor puer Dionae rure natus creditur:
hunc ager cum parturiret ipsa suscepit sinu,
ipsa florum delicatis educavit osculis.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XX
ecce iam super genestas explicant tauri latus,
quisque coetus continetur coniugali foedere:
[ 198 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
XVIII
Lavinia of Laurentum she chose to bed
Her son Aeneas, and for the black Mars won
The virgin Silvia, to found the Roman line:
Sire Romulus, and Caesar her grandson.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XIX
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus:
For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
From the rich furrow she snatched him to her breast,
With tender flowers taught him peculiar charm.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XX
See how the bullocks rub their flanks with broom!
See the ram pursue through the shade the bleating
ewe,
[ 199 ]
PERVIGILIUM VENERIS
subter umbras cum maritis ecce balantum gregem,
et canoras non tacere diva iussit alites.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XXI
iam loquaces ore rauco stagna cycni perstrepunt:
adsonat Terei puella subter umbram populi,
ut potes motus amoris ore dici musicos,
at neges queri sororem de marito barbaro.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
XXII
ilia cantat, nos tacemus: quando ver venit meum?
quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam?
perdidi musam tacendo, nee me Apollo respicit:
sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium.
eras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras
amet.
[ 200 ]
THE VIGIL OF VENUS
For lovers' union is Venus in kind pursuit;
And she tells the birds to forget their winter woe.
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XXI
Now the tall swans with hoarse cries thrash the lake:
The girl of Tereus pours from the poplar ring
Musical change sad sister who bewails
Her act of darkness with the barbarous kingl
Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make
love.
XXII
She sings, we are silent. When will my spring come?
Shall I find my voice when I shall be as the swallow?
Silence destroyed the Amyclae: they were dumb.
Silent, I lost the muse. Return, Apollo!
Tomorrow let loveless, let lover tomorrow make
love.
[ 201 ]
FAREWELL TO ANACTORIA
(Sappho)
Never the tramp of foot or horse,
Nor lusty cries from ship at sea,
Shall I call loveliest on the dark earth-
My heart moves lovingly.
I say that what one loves is best:
The midnight fastness of the heart.
Helen, you took the beauty of men
With unpitying art!
White Paris from Idean hills
For you the Trojan towers razed
Who swiftly ploughed the black seas
Had on your white arm gazedl
Oh, how loving from afar
Led you to grief, for in your mind
The present was too light, as ever
Among fair womankind. . . .
[ 202 ]
FAREWELL TO ANACTORIA
So, Anactoria, go you away
With what calm carelessness of sorrow!
Your gleaming footstep and your grace,
When comes another morrow,
Much would I rather then behold
Than Lydian cars or infantry.
I ask the lot of blessedness,
Beloved, in memory.
[ 203 ]
ADAPTATION OF A THEME BY CATULLUS
(From the translation by Aubrey Beardsley)
Carmen CI
Past towns, states, deserts, hills and rivers borne
By the first plane, brother, I've come today,
A spirit, to linger at your spiritless clay
That sleeps well-dressed beyond the reach of scorn :
Not glad, lifeless tycoon, nor sorry feel
For neither Bull nor Bear attends your way
Ah, vanity of speech, what should I say?
The grave encloses you with technical zeal
For Chance, swift giver, may just as swiftly take.
Accept these costly wreaths for my own sake
(Death asks no entrance fee to let you in)
And for the decent sense of heaven and hell:
Take them, and think not much on mortal sin.
Now, brother, time being money, I say farewell.
[ 204 ]
CORRESPONDENCES
(From the French of Charles Baudelaire/
All nature is a temple where the alive
Pillars breathe often a tremor of mixed words;
Man wanders in a forest of accords
That peer familiarly from each ogive.
Like thinning echoes tumbling to sleep beyond
In a unity umbrageous and infinite,
Vast as the night stupendously moonlit,
All smells and colors and sounds correspond.
Odors blown sweet as infants' naked flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as a studded plain,
Others, corrupt, rich and triumphant, thresh
Expansions to the infinite of pain:
Amber and myrrh, benzoin and musk condense
To transports of the spirit and the sense!
1 [ 205 ]
A CARRION
(From the French of Charles Baudelaire)
Remember now, my Love, what piteous thing
We saw on a summer's gracious day:
By the roadside a hideous carrion, quivering
On a clean bed of pebbly clay,
Her legs flexed in the air like a courtesan,
Burning and sweating venomously,
Calmly exposed its belly, ironic and wan,
Clamorous with foul ecstasy.
The sun bore down upon this rottenness
As if to roast it with gold fire,
And render back to nature her own largess
A hundredfold of her desire.
Heaven observed the vaunting carcass there
Blooming with the richness of a flower;
And that almighty stink which corpses wear
Choked you with sleepy power!
[ 206 ]
A CARRION
The flies swarmed on the putrid vulva, then
A black tumbling rout would seethe
Of maggots, thick like a torrent in a glen,
Over those rags that lived and seemed to breathe.
They darted down and rose up like a wave
Or buzzed impetuously as before;
One would have thought the corpse was held a slave
To living by the life it bore!
This world had music, its own swift emotion
Like water and the wind running,
Or corn that a winnower in rhythmic motion
Fans with fiery cunning.
All forms receded, as in a dream were still,
Where white visions vaguely start
From the sketch of a painter s long-neglected idyl
Into a perfect art!
Behind the rocks a restless bitch looked on
Regarding us with jealous eyes,
Waiting to tear from the livid skeleton
Her loosed morsel quick with flies,
[ 207 ]
A CARRION
And even you will come to this foul shame,
This ultimate infection,
Star of my eyes, my being's inner flame,
My angel and my passion!
Yes: such shall you be, O queen of heavenly grace,
Beyond the last sacrament,
When through your bones the flowers and sucking
grass
Weave their rank cerement.
Speak, then, my Beauty, to this dire putrescence,
To the worm that shall kiss your proud estate,
That I have kept the divine form and the essence
Of my festered loves inviolate!
[ 208 ]
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